Saturday, July 25

Nintendo will pull plug on Wii U’s TVii service August 11

Tech companies love to announce major rounds of layoffs and service disruptions in the breezy hours at the end of a workweek, and Nintendo joined that proud tradition on Friday by nixing the weirdest service attached to its beleaguered Wii U console: Nintendo TVii.

In an announcement at both TVii's official support site and its Miiverse page, Nintendo confirmed that TVii, a TV Guide-style interface meant to help users sort through live and streaming video listings, would no longer function after August 11. "Every service has a life cycle, and it is time to focus our resources on other projects," the support site's FAQ read; we suppose that means Nintendo thinks a full three years is pushing it in terms of "life cycle."

That being said, the free service had been swirling down a figurative toilet for some time. In particular, TVii received a considerable, stealth downgrade in 2014 that removed its most interesting feature: the ability to search for a TV show across a number of sources, from a cable box to Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime. With that feature stripped, TVii existed mostly to offer basic cable-box TV listings and provide a strange, TVii-only forum for sports fans to vote and comment on live matches. The service never even launched outside of North America, in spite of repeated promises by Nintendo for a European TVii launch.

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