Wii With DVD Playback Coming in 2007?

Nintendo, ever the master of shooting itself in the foot, has quite possibly found the worst time to unveil some of their future plans for the Wii. Originally, way back in 2005 Nintendo stated that the Wii would have DVD playback, and the fans rejoiced - this was a much-lauded departure from Nintendo’s strategy with the Gamecube of focusing ONLY on gaming. After a long silence, Nintendo confirmed earlier this year that the Wii would NOT in fact have DVD playback. The reason given was that this would help to lower the cost of the console for consumers and ultimately wouldn’t make much of a difference, given that DVD player penetration is already quite high, worldwide.

Now comes the curious news… just today (barely a week before launch) Sonic Solutions announced that they had been tapped by Nintendo to create a DVD-playback solution for the Wii. The announcement stated that the Sonic Solutions will be working on a software-based playback method that will be released with an updated Wii console sometime in 2007. First of all, there’s the question of firmware updating - given that Nintendo has engineered a relatively flexible, updatable OS for the Wii, why hasn’t Nintendo thought about figuring out a way to implement this software on the current Wii console via a software update? Can the current Wii not handle this amount of processing? And second, REALLY REALLY bad timing Nintendo… are you trying to convince anyone that might be wavering on whether or not to pick up a Wii to wait until 2007? The current news really doesn’t make any sense at all - we can only hope that Nintendo will clarify all this and hopefully tell us that our circa 2006 Wiis will eventually be DVD-compatible.

The full announcement can be found after the jump.

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