Thursday nights are a common TV time for me. I’ll usually catch the NBC comedy lineup, bounce over to CBS for The Big Bang Theory, and wrap things up with Brian Williams and a segment or two of the Rock Center newsmagazine. Tonight, I followed my usual routine – but with the Wii U GamePad in my hands.
Nintendo TVii debuted today. It was an application originally promised for Wii U’s launch, but ended up being pushed back about a month. Perhaps because it wasn’t quite ready for primetime.
And it still seems like it may not be. Nintendo TVii is interesting, but it’s also currently incomplete, clunky and more of a hassle than its few benefits seem to be worth.
Nintendo TVii doesn’t require a download from the eShop – it’s already there on your Wii U Menu. It has been since you got your system and installed the laborious Day 1 update, of course, it’s just been non-functional. Now, it functions. Instead of a message telling you to come back in December, you instead are taken to the first of several set-up screens, asking you to input your zip code.
That leads into a listing of television service providers in your area, and you’re asked to pick the one you’re subscribed to. A simple enough request, except that the navigation is unintuitive and unresponsive – on my first attempt, this simple menu didn’t seem to register any input at all. I eventually figured out you had to use the touch screen and swipe the thin horizontal list to the left repeatedly until your provider appeared, but if you pick the wrong one in this process, the setup just moves along and doesn’t allow you to correct your error.
Picking favorites.
Assuming you get this part squared away, you’re then carried along to a listing of popular TV shows and asked to select your favorites. After that, it’s a list of movies that, again, asks you to pick out the ones you like best. Sports follows along third, as you navigate through nested lists of NFL, NBA and NCAA teams to choose those you most like to root for.
TVii is building your personal profile all this while, and compiling the data from which it will recommend shows for you to watch later on. It remains to be seen how accurate, over time, its analysis of my own viewing preferences will be – the “Recommended” options today seemed to still be pretty generalized.
Go Cats!
Once you’ve told Nintendo TVii how much you love The Simpsons, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and the Chicago Bulls, you’ve got just one last step to complete the software’s setup – tying it into your social media accounts. Miiverse is tied to TVii by default, but you can also link up Facebook and Twitter. For Facebook, you’re given a URL to visit and a code to enter that will add the Nintendo TVii app to your Facebook account. For Twitter, you simply have to sign in with your username and password for that site.
And then you’re ready to start tweeting, commenting and status-updating while watching your favorite shows, right? Well, not so fast. It turns out that social media support is restricted. Only certain shows support it, at certain times.
Searching for something to watch.
I ran into this issue this afternoon, as TVii first went live at about 4 p.m. in my time zone. I tried it immediately, wanting to test tweeting while I watched, but zero shows airing in the afternoon supported the feature. So no live-tweeting while you’re watching Dora the Explorer with your toddler, or Friends reruns on TBS.
No, the feature only seems to function for certain live sporting events and primetime programs, while they’re happening. Luckily, once you’re engaged in one of those selected shows and start following along with all the other Wii U users who are also currently watching it, TVii starts to show signs of its potential.
The timeline of "TV Moments" for tonight's Person of Interest on CBS.
Parks & Recreation was a rerun this evening, so I could devote my focus to tweeting and surfing around the Miiverse while Leslie Knope once again tried to educate the elderly residents of Pawnee about healthy sexual behaviors. TVii follows along with shows as they happen, taking snapshots of the action on the screen roughly every minute or so and giving a brief description of what’s just happened in the plot.
This could actually be beneficial for catching up on a show if you’re starting to watch it late, as you can scroll back through the snapshot moments to get a sense of the plot thus far. And this is also how comments are organized – you can’t just randomly tweet out at any point. You have to pick one of these “TV Moments” to serve as the launching pad for your commentary.
The snapshots TVii takes aren't always the best. Yeah.
It works well, as I was able to make a timely quote of a funny line, then express my appreciation for Pawnee’s Perd Hapley easily enough. You can visit my Twitter page to see those comments, if you like. But while you’re there, you may notice something a little odd: Nintendo TVii takes your comment and frames it for you in a fairly odd manner.
For example, my comment as entered on the GamePad was “What’s the word, Perd?” Hilarious, I know. My comment as it was actually sent out via Twitter, though, read as “I commented on a TV Moment: "What’s the word, Perd?" #NintendoTVii”. The software automatically adds the NintendoTVii hashtag and the “I commented on a TV Moment” statement to everything. That’s not a horrible thing, I don’t guess, but it makes your Twitter stream seem pretty robotic if you’re making several comments in a row.
This one doesn't need a caption.
Nintendo TVii is plagued by a laundry list of other faults that will need to be ironed out in the future too, like stuttering menus, lengthy load times and the fact that DVR support isn’t currently available. (Or Hulu. Or Netflix.) Comments you make will also get double-posted to Facebook twice if you’ve got it and Twitter linked and you tie TVii to both. Really, what we’ve been given access to today is more like Nintendo TVii Beta, a glimpse of what the service could offer someday.
But there is one saving grace for TVii right now, in its current form – sports. Watching a live game with TVii running on the GamePad is very, very cool. I actually tested this out before heading over to NBC’s comedies, catching parts of the Poinsettia Bowl on ESPN and the end of the Timberwolves vs. Thunder NBA game.
A full record of every play in the game, in order, with stats and visual aids.
Watching both games rocked. I’m not personally a fan of any of the teams who were playing, but the streaming, constantly updated info on the GamePad screen made me feel more invested. For the football game, a display of the field gave a diagram of every single play, letting you scroll back and forth through the entire game and see every run, pass, fumble and field goal. And comment on any of them, any time after they’d happened.
For basketball, a similar court diagram gave you a visual indicator of where shots had just been launched from on the floor and whether or not they made it through the net. Constantly-updated “moments,” each available for commentary, keep a continuous scroll on the right side of the GamePad screen as well. I was impressed with the speed – when Westbrook went to the line to shoot a free throw and made it, the GamePad said exactly that and invited your comment. When he hit the second one in a row, the post about him making the first shot auto-updated itself to read that he’d made both.
It may seem to be a subtle thing, but even a not-so-much-of-a sports fan like myself could see the appeal here. I can’t wait to see how the Miiverse, Facebook and Twitter explode during huge live events like the Super Bowl.
For basketball, see where every shot in the game was launched from in one image.
And so concluded my first evening with Nintendo TVii. Will I use it again? I think I will, especially to show my friends and family how it interacts with sporting events and connects you to other Wii U-owning fans watching the same games along with you. But I’d like to see Nintendo address some of the issues I encountered here when rolling out future updates for the software. We know they’re coming, as DVR support, Hulu and Netflix integration are still being prepped. So maybe, when those updates arrive, they can also give us a menu option that lets us toggle off things like “I commented on a TV Moment. I commented on a TV Moment. I commented on a TV Moment.”
Because, if they do, I may be more likely to want to comment on more TV moments.
The verdict: Nintendo TVii is kind of incomplete, definitely clunky and maybe more of a hassle than it's worth in its current form. But the potential is definitely there.
We'll just have to wait for that potential to be unlocked.
You can follow Lucas on Twitter, @lucasmthomas, to now find out what cartoons he watches on Saturday mornings. Spoiler: it’s Ninja Turtles.
Source : ign[dot]com
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