Making the BBC iPlayer accessible via Nintendo’s Wii is a stroke of genius.

The availability of the iPlayer effectively doubles-up the Wii as a set-top box, giving us Brits selected BBC TV shows, on demand. It blesses the Wii with an extended ‘digital home’ talent that most owners didn’t think it was capable of.

The iPlayer makes TV schedules irrelevant

The iPlayer is a undeniably handy service if you missed a TV show everybody’s talking about or you forgot to set your PVR. You could argue that it's a glimpse of the way we might watch TV in the future. But there’s still something awkward about watching Torchwood or Ashes to Ashes on a laptop or monitor screen. Television remains at its best when viewed on a proper TV, preferably when you’re slouched in a comfy sofa with a tube of Jaffa Cakes.

Manufacturers have always struggled to bridge the gap between Internet and TV. The current generation of Freeview and Sky set-top boxes aren’t Internet-friendly, while modern media extenders and video streamers are over-complicated and typically require a PC to act as the middleware.

The Wii offers a simple and populist solution, although ISPs will argue that it puts a considerable strain on their resources). Nintendo's console isn't just a games machine with clever motion-sensitive controllers. Wii owners can already use the built-in Opera browser to watch YouTube videos or to stream audio and video content from a PC using the free online Orb service. But until now, the iPlayer hasn’t been compatible.

How does it work?

So one question remains: how is the BBC iPlayer going to work on the Wii? The Wii’s Opera browser currently supports an old version of Flash (version 7, to be exact), which is currently incompatible with the iPlayer’s streaming video requirements.

According to Nintendo, there there's been some small tweaking work on both the BBC side and on the Nintendo side to ensure compatibility with the iPlayer. Nintendo hasn’t yet elaborated on what this ‘tweaking work’ consists of, but the Beeb's tweaking is much more substantial.

"Nintendo Wii supports only Flash 7," writes Anthony Rose, the BBC's Head of Digital Media Technologies, and Flash 7 "uses the Sorenson Spark codec rather than the ON2 VP6 codec introduced with Flash 8." The BBC is basically "transcoding an additional 400 hours [of video] per week" for the Wii.

The BBC has been really pushing the iPlayer online – it’s available on the PC (with a DRM-enabled download option), Mac, iPhone/iPod touch and it will be appearing on the Virgin Media platform this April.

UK web users have certainly taken to it. In March, the BBC’s own data suggests that 17.2 million requests were made to download or stream BBC programmes via the iPlayer. Consider that Nintendo has sold over 2.5 million Wii consoles since launch - that’s a big potential audience.