Recently there have been rumours and questions all over the gaming industry surrounding Netflix's partnership with Microsoft and the Xbox 360. Today though Netflix have confirmed the service is exclusive to the console "for now", as news comes via EDGE:

"Netflix is always looking for ways to grow the service. For now, Netflix streaming on game consoles is exclusively on the Xbox 360 - and it's a terrific hit," a spokesperson said. "More than one million Netflix members who are Xbox Gold members have watched more than 1.5 billion minutes of movies and TV episodes instantly over the internet from Netflix via their Xbox 360."

In the last few weeks rumours have been circulating that the streaming service would maybe see the light of day on Sony's Playstation 3. An advert on the company's website was displayed asking for applicants with years of experience and the following message:

"You are familiar with several of those consoles, the technical hurdles associated with them, and the means of navigating those hurdles."

At the same time there were reports of Netflix conducting surveys, asking Playstation 3 owners if they would be interested in the service, and surprisingly Nintendo's Wii owners were also asked.

Since the advert and survey Iwata (president of Nintendo) confirmed an "on-demand video" service for the Wii and DS was in the works. It remains to be seen if this is a partnership between the two companies or if Nintendo are doing it on their own. Iwata gave some insight to the plans:

"If the Wii and the DS are connected, it should be possible to download video through the Wii and take it with you on the DS," he said.

"When the service begins, you'll see how we're going to do it differently in a Nintendo-like way. There are a lot of on-demand video services, so there's no reason to do the same thing, so we're going to do something different."

The lack of a large storage device for the Wii could be a concern and might force Nintendo to release an add-on hard drive finally if the movies and TV shows are able to be downloaded and saved and not only streamed.

Posted: Apr 16, 2009 6:50 pm