The Wii’s blue glow this morning alerted me to another message from those nice people at Nintendo.  I’d been anticipating this, following the recent announcement by the BBC of plans for a Wii iPlayer channel.  Sure enough, there was a brief message explaining the new channel and a handy button to connect to the Wii shop.  The iPlayer channel software is free, of course, and it downloaded in less than a minute.  I chose to download to the Wii memory rather than to the SD card, as I expect the iPlayer channel to become one of my favourites.

I’ve watched the BBC iPlayer via the Wii’s Opera browser, and found it quite acceptable.  I was looking forward to a simpler approach to iPlayer viewing, and the new channel didn’t disappoint.

The iPlayer appears, as you’d expect, as another channel on the Wii menu.  It starts significantly more quickly than the Opera browser, taking about ten seconds to bring up the home page.  From there it’s pretty much what you’d expect.  I tried one of the recent Horizon programmes, “How long is a piece of string?”.  Playback started almost immediately.  Picture quality is excellent.  Sound likewise.  Controls are pretty basic, with a pause/play button and a back button, visible on screen only when you move the Wii controller.  The + and – buttons on the controller perform skip forward and back; for the one hour programme I was viewing, the skipped time was six minutes, so perhaps one tenth of the programme length?  Pressing the D-pad left and right moves  focus between pause/play and back buttons.

There’s an online FAQ for the iPlayer, accessed via a Help button on the main screen.  Pages requiring scrolling have a slider on the right but this has to be clicked with the A button… the D-pad up/down is not enabled, which would have been nice.

This is UK only, due to broadcast regs, and (according to the FAQ) your broadband connection needs to be at least 1 Mb/s.

Verdict: if you live in the UK and your Wii has a moderately fast broadband connection, give the Wii iPlayer channel a try.  I think you’ll like it.

P.S. I have posted a guide to connecting your Wii to the Internet, with plenty of screenshots.