Why Nintendo TVii missed Wii U launch

Nintendo's new Wii U console launched today in the United States without one of its more novel features: Nintendo TVii. The Mario maker told GameSpot last night at the Wii U launch event in New York City that the streaming service's delay to December was borne of a desire to make it "absolutely perfect."

"Well, I think everybody who knows Nintendo, knows that Nintendo wants everything to be the absolute best that it can," Nintendo director of product marketing Bill Trinen said. "Obviously, we wanted to have Nintendo TVii available as soon as possible. There's just a few additional tweaks that need to be made."

Trinen does not foresee the delay of Nintendo TVii negatively impacting the Wii U launch, primarily due to gamers having a number of other system features to spend time with.

"To be honest, I don't think that there's going to be a tremendous impact because the people are going to be going home tonight and they're going to be playing games; they're going to be experiencing Miiverse for the first time," Trinen said. "And that, I think, is going to give them a lot to be looking at and kind of figuring out. There's Wii U chat that's there on day one and Netflix is also going to be a part of the day-one offering. eShop, along with a ton of content, is also there day-one."

For Trinen, it all comes down to quality. He said Nintendo would rather delay TVii than ship a service that gamers would not be satisfied with.

Bill Trinen.

"So it's really more about just making sure that that Nintendo TVii service is absolutely perfect when it launches," he said. "Because we think it's probably more important that people sit down with it the first time and have a really great experience and want to keep using it than necessarily trying to push it out too soon and have people dissatisfied with it."

Nintendo TVii works with cable and satellite providers, as well as streaming services like Hulu and Netflix. Players must hold a subscription to these services to use Nintendo TVii, but no additional fees or equipment are required.

TVii viewers can use the GamePad to interact with others through commenting on specific live television moments and sharing those comments with others through Miiverse, Facebook, and Twitter.

GameSpot's full interview with Trinen will run tomorrow.