Wii Warm Up: The Wii effect
Will the Wii help move the internet into the living room? Some people think that Nintendo's sleek new system might just succeed at what Microsoft has been hoping to do since day one: turn the home gaming console into a media center, and thus move our multimedia experience to the sofa. The combination of the Opera browser and the Wii remote makes couch-surfing (pun intended) stupidly easy. No, you're not going to transcribe War and Peace without a keyboard, but for anyone used to text messaging, the interface and predictive text make typing far easier than we might have expected.
You guys may not have been 100% in love with the Wii browser, but one comment from yesterday's discussion really stood out: the ease of watching videos, despite some limitations with the browser and Flash support. Forget what we can't do right now; that can always be changed. Think instead about the ease of watching YouTube from the sofa with a remote control. Once again, these aspects of the Wii aren't really about us (though we can certainly reap the benefits along with everyone else). We're not going to buy a console just to browse the internet or play tennis; we're interested in lots of games on our consoles, and we have phones and handhelds and computers with which we can trade cat pictures and the always-hilarious head of Leonidas. This is about the people who never even noticed the game consoles before. It's about that 30% of households predicted to own a Wii by 2011. The Wii remote puts all of what we take for granted quite literally in the palm of their hands, and because of that, it really could change the face of the internet. Browsing from the sofa is a different experience, after all.
We'll wait and see ... but it's plausible, don't you think? Where do you see the web in three years?
