Slashdot Mirror
Aging Consoles Find New Life As Video Streamers
MojoKid writes "Microsoft's Xbox 360 console is six years old. The Nintendo Wii is five years old, and so is the Sony PlayStation 3. All three are due for an overhaul (can you imagine gaming on a PC that's half a decade old, or more?), and while they're still popular gaming platforms, consoles are really starting to shine as streaming media centers. According to market research firm Nielsen, streaming video on game consoles is up over last year. Xbox 360 owners now use their consoles to stream video 14 percent of the time, which is almost as much as PS3 users (15 percent). But it's the Wii that sees the most time as a streaming device, with Wii owners using their consoles to stream video a third of the time."
>(can you imagine gaming on a PC that's half a decade old, or more?)
yes, I do it daily... TF2 still rocks.
The Wii has a pretty good Netflix client/interface. MUCH better than on my TiVo (which mostly just rebuffers and crashes). But, I recently got a Roku XD for $50, and that's better, still. Plus, it does HD and HDMI, which the Wii doesn't.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
But it's the Wii that sees the most time as a streaming device, with Wii owners using their consoles to stream video a third of the time.
The fact that a Wii is used for streaming 33 *percent* of the time has nothing to do with the *amount* of time spent streaming. It's not only possible, but very likely that XBox and PS3 users spend a lot more total time using their consoles than Wii users.
These days, I could. Because the 80s and 90s were something of a fluke in which hardware was progressing at a rapid rate, it coincided with the growth of the video game industry and attracted a lot of hardware geeks. But that era is gone, and hardware has stabilized to the point where new games are coming out targeting five year old hardware, and most people are okay with it. Skyrim runs on my first-generation Intel iMac from 2006.
Diminishing returns in game development has reached the point where the jump to more powerful hardware, and therefore even higher-fidelity visuals, is just costing too much to justify the expense. That is the state of technology today. Some people don't like it because they want to forever relive the glory days of 90s MHz marketing and 3D card upgrades, but it's over, and thank goodness.
I stream with the Wii because I don't have an HDTV nor will we for the foreseeable future. I'm guessing there are plenty of people in the same boat as me who, with one kid and one on the way, one income and very little disposable cash, can't seem to justify a $500 TV purchase when we're using Netflix instead of cable to save money in the first place.
Nintendo did it right in terms of how it handles its realtionship with netflix.
Microsoft insists you have gold membership before you can use netflix on the 360. This costs you an extra 10$/mo. Combined, if all you want is streaming, this costs you 18$/mo. This double dipping to use netflix prompted me to shell out the one time cost of a wii. It streams netflix 80% or more of the time I use it.
I recently set up a sony blueray disc player for a friend of my sister's, which can stream netflix. In order to activate it, you have to agree to an eula from sony, register the device for streaming through sony, agree to a sony tos, *THEN* you can activate the device through netflix. Once you do, the netflix experience is lacklustre, having super teeny tiny cover art thumbnails, and a terrible search experience from the remote.
I had none of those issues with the wii. Go to the wii market, pull the free app, sign up with netflix and register the device, and off you go. No 3rd parties to the transaction, no eulas and tos to agree to with nintendo to enable it, nada. The cover art is the wii netflix app is large enough to read from the couch easily, and it is quick and easy to search with the wiimote without entering the konomi code on the damn thing just to pick a letter.
The only drawback of the wii is that it is a low resolution device, and can't really push HD. If it did better than 480p at max it would be an ideal netflix appliance.
I don't know what the situation is on the ps3 with netflix, since last I heard psn was free, but with an abysmally one sided eula--
When Nintendo named the Wii back in 2005...I doubt they imagined that Streaming would become a popular use for the device.
None of us want to go around saying "I stream with my Wii"
We'd all sound like a bunch of 5 yr olds making obvious but inappropriate comments. :)
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
No wonder that set-top boxes don't sell.
The bad part about this is that the set-top boxes draw a very small fraction of the power as the game consoles, which are power hungry beasts. I'm just spouting crap off randomly, as is my wont, but the Wii would have to be the lowest power consumer of the 3 major console systems. However the Wii would still be vastly more power hungry than a Roku, TiVo or Apple TV.
Okay, okay. I can't believe I'm doing this here on Slashdot (backing up my assertions with references) but here you go:
http://www.hardcoreware.net/reviews/review-356-2.htm
The Wii uses 1/10th the power of an XBox 360 or PS3. A quick search shows that a Roku uses around 5-6 watts when in use, which is half of the Wii's 11 watts.
So the moral of the story - using an XBox 360 or PS3 for streaming is very, very inefficient power-wise compared to dedicated set-top boxes or even the Wii.
Better known as 318230.