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You could have been forgiven for missing it, but last week a little piece of this console generation died. That's a term often thrown about thoughtlessly, but here it fits, with several of Nintendo's Wii Channels having made their final bows before disappearing forever. So, farewell then: to the Everybody Votes channel, the Forecast and News channels, Check Mii Out and the Nintendo Channel. It's impossible to know figures, but one doubts that these services were used a great deal in 2013 - and in a world of tablet and smartphone functionality, things have somewhat moved on. Yet these Channels should not be buried without praise and, much more than that, an understanding of why such unassuming oddities existed at all.
Nintendo's history with online services is much longer than most people realise, and an interesting if minor point of comparison came almost exactly a decade before Wii - 1995's Satellaview add-on for the SNES. Consider the pack-in software, a cartridge called BS-X that had the appearance of a simple RPG, but was in fact the user interface for the Satellaview's various functions; that is, you walked around a little town and visited places to use different services. It is Nintendo trying to make internet services accessible in a way that made sense to a SNES audience. In other words, and this is an observation rather than a criticism, it is essentially insular.
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