Japanese TV Networks Afraid Of The Big Bad Wii Video Service

As you know, Nintendo are teaming up with Japanese ad agency Dentsu to launch a video service on the Wii next year. Japanese Wii owners are intrigued. Japanese TV networks, however? They’re afraid.

A senior executive at Fuju Television – the biggest network in Japan – says that if the Wii was able to become the “centrepiece of the living room”, it would be “the stuff of television producers’ nightmares”.

Why? Consider this: Wii Vote has been quietly gathering information on just who the kind of people are that regularly take their Wii online. What they like, who they are, that sort of thing.

Now consider Nintendo are launching the service with an ad agency. Just the kind of people who can use that data to pipe Wii owners exactly the kind of content they’re looking for.

A free-to-air TV network – which has to cover every demographic base it can think of – just couldn’t compete with that kind of targeted service.

Which means that, once the service launches later this year, every Wii sold is potentially one person/family lost to tv networks, and lost to the advertisers that fund them.

That is, if the service doesn’t completely suck.

Nintendo to take on broadcasters with Wii TV [The Times]