Nintendo’s Wii made a big splash last year as a gaming device that spans generations. Now, thanks to a new service from a company called moowee.tv, the Wii promises to span the gap between User Generated Content (UGC) sites, like YouTube, and the Television. 

Launched around two months ago, moowee.tv aggregates content from sites like YouTube, Google Video and dailymotion and makes it television friendly. 

Moowee manages to integrate and exploit the social networking aspects of the UCG sites to create custom and shared channels.  They have created a relatively simple guide that is more television-like, than computer-like; clip streams in a continuous fashion allowing users to lean back and be spoon-fed their UCG.  It has separate windows for the content and the various meta-data.  For instance, this description will appear in a banner below its associated video. 

The quality of the videos was better than expected, even when in full-screen mode.  The quality of the video is only as good as the source encoding, however, and the quality difference was noticeable from program to program.  The quality definitely appeared better on the Wii, as compared to my laptop.   

Channel selection is amazingly fast and they have different categories including channels created by moowee.tv (e.g. Anime, Arts, etc.), selected by moowee.tv (Moopix), voyeuristic viewing (watching what other people are watching) and custom channels selected either by the viewer or by other viewers.It is also possible to search using the Wii’s on-screen keyboard and find videos associated with a given search term.It is also possible to create a channel from a search term.

The best part of the service is that it is no cost to the Wii-owning consumer.At this point, they are in the subscriber-building phase.They anticipate monetizing the service with advertising and sponsorship, as well as premium content subscriptions.Check out this brief video interview with Kris Harikrishnan, the Founder and CEO of moowee.tv, to see why I think this service might cause some people to pick up a Wii and drop Cable TV.

To see a more a video that provides more detail on the moowee.tv interface, click here.