Nintendo TVii will be shutting down on August 11, 2015, according to a Miiverse announcement. TVii will be taken down at 12 p.m. on the 11th, and the Wii U will receive a system update that will remove Nintendo TVii from the system menus.
“We sincerely thank you for all of your engagement within the community and the Nintendo TVii service,” the post reads. “We look forward to your contributions within our many other Miiverse communities.”
Nintendo TVii is a free service that let users watch TV through the Wii and their cable provider. The GamePad served as another way to interact with the shows via social media and personalized recommendations. Nintendo touted a feature where users could predict the outcomes of sports games and see how they ranked on a leaderboard. And of course, you could draw on the GamePad and add your own dramatic effects to TV shows. TVii was announced even before the launch of the Wii U, and shipped as a pre-installed app though it wasn’t available until a month after launch.
It had its problems. TVii was slow and clunky, hampered by the Wii U’s operating speed. Other video apps available on the Wii U include YouTube, Amazon Prime, Hulu Plus, Netflix, and Crunchyroll. Nintendo currently has no plans to replace Nintendo TVii with another Nintendo streaming app.
This year Nintendo also killed off Club Nintendo, the loyalty program that rewarded gamers for each game they bought for Nintendo consoles. Ending services like Club Nintendo and Nintendo TVii is part of an ongoing effort by Nintendo to trim down the services they offer as they move into creating mobile games, and launching what is potentially a new console, the Nintendo NX.
