In its relentless quest for world living-room domination, Nintendo is preparing to take on the might of the world's biggest broadcasters by launching its own television channel.

Viewable by anyone with a Wii games console and an internet connection, the Wiinoma channel is expected to deliver a family- oriented blizzard of cartoons, “brain-training” quizzes, cookery, educational and other lifestyle shows: all of it original content produced exclusively for Nintendo.

Broadcasts in Japan should begin in the spring and the console maker is considering international expansion that would lead to the channel being available in the homes of about 40million Wii owners by the end of 2009.

Nintendo's move into the “harvesting phase” of the Wii console has come far more quickly than many expected. Koki Shiraishi, of Daiwa Securities, said the television channel would allow the company to exploit the huge existing base of Wii users to make the critical shift towards content-based revenues.

The launch of the TV channel - effectively a video-on-demand download service - will initially take the form of a partnership between Nintendo and Dentsu, Japan's largest advertising agency. The agency will produce the programmes and sell advertising.

However, Nintendo's success as a broadcaster is hardly guaranteed: the company has attempted to use previous generations of its consoles to deliver non-games content but every scheme has ended in failure. The company's big Christmas in-house title, Wii Music, has flopped - bringing to an end a long run of success in the current games market.

It is understood that most of the content of the channel will be delivered free, with Nintendo relying on advertising revenues. However, it is expected that the company will be able to make use of the Wii Point payment system that is currently used for buying and downloading vintage games to generate some fee income.

News of Nintendo's move into broadcasting is likely to fill executives of many traditional television companies with dread. One senior executive at Fuji Television, Japan's biggest commercial broadcaster, told The Times that if plans by Satoru Iwata, the Nintendo president, to make the Wii “the centerpiece of the living room” took off in a meaningful way, Nintendo's ambitions were “the stuff of television producers' nightmares”.

The prospect of content deliberately tailored by Nintendo for its audience, he said, could cause a deep dent in prime-time viewing figures and comes as Japanese broadcasters are being pilloried for relying too heavily on repeats and celebrity formats.

Almost since the launch of the Wii in 2006, there has been an attempt to herd users with a net connection through the welcome screen towards a small collection of “channels” delivering downloads of online games, daily weather updates and a variety of other simple content. But one of the channels - Wii Vote - plays a more sophisticated role.

Users are encouraged to pose questions to the domestic or global Wii community at large and then vote on the answers. The questions - often banal and occasionally surreal - nevertheless produce, through the aggregate of the answers, an impressive body of knowledge about the kind of people using Nintendo's machines.

And, from an advertiser's point of view, the potential audience numbers of a Nintendo channel are compelling. The machine's family-friendly games, low price and innovative controls have already given the machine a huge sales lead over rival consoles produced by Sony and Microsoft, and appear to have permanently altered the demographics of the games market: Nintendo's own research suggests that in contrast with previous generations of games consoles, 50 per cent of Wii users are women.

The company also believes that of the 40 million Wii units sold around the world, about 18 million are connected to the internet. That percentage is expected to rise over coming months as recession bites and straitened family budgets encourage more home-based entertainment.

Playing seriously

3.5m Wii units sold in Britain

75.5m estimated units of games console software sold in 2008

£2.2bn UK games software market

£180 - cost of the Wii

Source: Times research

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