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Could Nintendo ever have a streaming service?


It seems like streaming is going to be the future of media overall. Pretty much every major TV network has a streaming-service. Every major cable channel has one. All of the premium cable channels have them. Movie studios have them as well. Even professional sports organizations have them. They are everywhere. Not only are they everywhere, but they seem to either be consolidating into larger conglomerations, or are shifting content back and forth between each other. I've had an account with a service called VUDU for many years. It is a service where you can buy digital versions of movies, or use a download-code from a DVD or Blu-Ray you've purchased somewhere to download a digital version of that movie. Not too long ago, Fandango bought out VUDU and now the app has become Fandango At Home. I've noticed now on Fandango At Home that not only do I have a larger selection of movies to choose from, but now I can buy whole series from many other streaming networks like Netflix, Paramount Plus, MAX, Showtime, etc. Also, motion-pictures are coming to Fandango At Home and other streaming-platforms a lot sooner rather than later. The point is that streaming is here to stay and clearly is the future. So, where does Nintendo fit into all of this?


Well, I'm not going to go too deep into this, but there have been patents released by Nintendo in recent weeks that suggest some-type of "episodic" media. Whether that is part of a game, or part of some type of visual content from Nintendo's past and present I don't know. It could be much ado about nothing. There are couple of things to think about though. Remember back in 2011 when the first scans came out of the dev-kits for Project Cafe' came out? Not too long after that, images started to leak about what would eventually become the Wii U GamePad, but people were at the time coining the system as the "Nintendo Stream." Remember that? To an extent, that is basically what the Wii U was. It was a game console that could stream gameplay to the GamePad up to 25 feet. Obviously, that was very limited and just one of MANY reasons why the Wii U did not perform well only selling 13 million units. Sony has taken that idea much farther with the PlayStation Portal where you can stream games from your PlayStation 5 device anyplace that has access to Wi-Fi with speeds of 5MBPS or more. So far, the device has gotten solid reviews and is doing okay. There have been several attempts at streaming-games via the cloud as well. The first one I remember was OnLive which launched in 2009 and lasted until 2015. OnLive was plagued by many technical issues, and dealt with an infrastructure that really was not ready to handle cloud-gaming at the time. Ten years later, Google decided to give it a try with Google Stadia. Things when a bit better for them and the service actually worked pretty good, but it just failed to gain traction with the consumer base. In 2013, nVidia launched it's GeForce Now streaming service and that has been successful for them. While the nVidia Shield (the principle device designed to be used with GeForce Now) did not fair as well, the streaming service is alive and well today. I say all that to say this. Nintendo is very good at taking technology that others failed at, or was just laying around collecting dust, and then turning it into something profitable. The tech inside the Wii-Mote was technology that had been around for well over a decade, but the creator could not find a buyer for his technology. Even Sony turned him down in 2001, but ironically would create superior motion-control technology less than a decade later with PS Move. Is it "possible" that Nintendo might choose to throw it's hat into the streaming-arena in the next generation? Now, it doesn't necessarily have to be part of the Switch successor. In fact, it may also work with the current Nintendo Switch as well. In Japan, Nintendo has successful used streaming on the Switch. Being that the Switch is basically a tweaked version of the nVidia Shield, it is fully capable of handling the streaming of games, or video content. Also, I would not expect them to announce or even mention it anywhere near the reveal of the Switch Successor to avoid confusion like what happened with the Wii U. It's not that far-fetched of an idea that Nintendo would do this at this particular point in time. It also could have a hand as to why Nintendo has not announced the successor to the Nintendo Switch as of the time of this blog. Maybe they are still working out the bugs of that aspect of the system, and want to make sure that is all good to go before unveiling the console? Even if it is just a streaming-platform for video content, I think that would be cool. Not only would Nintendo content from the past be available to watch on-demand, but perhaps content from other companies that they partner with as well. Sega definitely comes to mind, as does Bandai-Namco. If game-streaming were also a part of this, that might explain a few things about why what little information that we have heard from 3rd-parties regarding the Switch successor has been positive. It's just a thought. While possible, this seems a little too ambitious for Nintendo. They usually give us the least that they can get away with giving us.

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