Wii news channel goes live

Nintendo launched the Wii news channel on Friday, a day early. We've already got the weather and internet channels and this update adds to the useful little things your Wii can do in addition to playing games.

It works like a simplified RSS reader really, it downloads the latest headlines and you can choose to read items by selecting from national, regional, international, sports, arts/entertainment, business, science/health and technology categories.

You then see a list of all the stories in that category and can either simply read them one at a time or see a 'slideshow' where it will automatically run through the headlines in full screen.

The clever part comes when stories have geotag information associated with them and it then plots them on a representation of the globe, just like the weather channel does. So as you go through the slideshow, the globe spins around and highlights the location of the story. Very cool.

You can also just manually spin around the globe and zoom in and out on regions and it will show you a stack of papers on locations to show you how much news there is. You can click on it and read or spin around to somewhere else. It even shows any photos that are attached to the story as well.

Overall a very nice new feature and I really feel Nintendo are leading the way here with simple, TV-based interfaces for browsing information rich content like news and weather. It works so well with the Wii remote because you can just point at things on the screen, so it's very much like using a mouse - certainly much easier than a normal joypad.

To see a video of the news channel in action, check out this YouTube video and you can see some pics here.