Nintendo Wii beats Apple TV

Yesterday, Apple announced that it’s Apple TV will soon be able to stream YouTube videos. Apple CEO Steve Jobs was quoted saying, “This is the first time users can easily browse, find and watch YouTube videos right from their living room couch.” After reading the quote, I was left feeling a little confused.

I’ve been browsing, finding and watching YouTube videos right from my living room couch for weeks now on my Nintendo Wii, which connects wirelessly to the internet and includes an Opera browser. With my Wii, which costs $50 less than the Apple TV, I’m not only able to watch videos on YouTube, but I can browse any site on the net and bookmark favorites just as easily as I can on my computer. Oh, and the Wii also plays some amazing games!

I admit, I thought the Apple TV was cool when I first saw it in the Apple store. Watching the videos in my iTunes library (and thanks to programs like TubeSock and HandBrake I have hundreds) on my TV was a cool opportunity. The other features, like watching movies or listening to my music, were pretty inconsequential. I already have speakers for my iPod and can rent all the movies I want to see from Netflix on DVD for as little as $4.99. The iTunes store, by comparison, makes me pay $9.99 for a movie that only plays on my iPod and doesn’t even include any special features or bonus material.

While the movie and music features didn’t interest me, viewing other videos from my iTunes library on my TV did pique my interest. I’ve built up quite a library of clips from TV shows, user-uploaded concert videos, and occasionally entire episodes of my favorite cancelled TV shows by ripping them from YouTube. Apple TV seemed to be the only thing that could bring all these clips to my TV.

Then I got the Wii.

One of the first things I did after nearly wearing out my arm playing all the Wii Sports games was to try out the Opera-powered internet browser. The Wii connected to my wireless network and I was able to browse webpages quickly and easily. Naturally, I checked out Trashwire and the Trashwire Blog to see how it looked on my TV.

After skimming the blog posts, I decided to try to watch one of the embedded YouTube videos. To my pleasant surprise, it loaded really fast and played right there on my TV. I immediately went to youtube.com to see more videos, finding all my favorites and playing them in full-screen mode as if they were on-demand clips. I couldn’t help but think to myself, “If someone could get the Wii, why on earth would they want an Apple TV?”

The best part of viewing the videos on the Wii is that there’s no need for me to rip them from YouTube, pay a cent for them on the Apple Store, or spend any time converting them to a format that will work on my TV. I simply visit youtube.com, find the video I want and click play just like I would if I was checking out the video on my computer.

Here’s an example. Trashwire readers know I am a huge fan of My Chemical Romance. Yesterday, the band released the brand new video for their song “Teenagers”. The video isn’t even available on the iTunes store yet, so that rules out paying $1.99 to download it to my computer. If I had the Apple TV and I still wanted to watch the video in my living room, I could go to the band’s YouTube channel, find the new video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6EQAOmJrbw), save it on my computer and convert it using TubeSock, add it to my iTunes library, then sync it to my Apple TV and watch it. That’s quite a few steps. The Wii makes it easy to watch the video on my TV without any downloading or converting. I just power on the console, go to the Internet Channel, click on YouTube (which I bookmarked to make it even faster), and watch the video right from the YouTube page. With the Wii, it’s like having the entire YouTube library on your TV on demand.

While both products don’t directly compete with one another (the Wii is a game console, the Apple TV is a home media system) their features are not mutually exclusive. The Wii also includes a photo application that lets you view pictures from any SD memory card right on your screen. You can also add MP3s to your memory card and listen to music during photo slide shows if you’re so inclined. Both of these features are hyped up as being ground-breaking and revolutionary by Apple, but they’re not even the main highlights of the Wii. The Wii does all those things and plays games, lets you create and share cool avatars called Wii Miis, includes a weather and news feed to keep you updated, and lets you play classic Nintendo and Sega games in the Virtual Console.

Since both the Apple TV and the Nintendo Wii have some similar functions, it seems like a natural choice to pick the one that does all that and more, especially if it costs $50 less.