The Wii News Channel, scheduled to debut Saturday, will primarily feature top news stories and photographs from The Associated Press.
Consoles with a broadband Internet connection and the Opera Web browser will be able to access the free news channel, which will offer AP news in multiple languages. Japanese-language news will come from a separate agency.
There were no immediate plans to sell advertising space, said Perrin Kaplan, vice president for marketing at Nintendo's U.S. headquarters in Redmond.
News will be displayed through an interactive map, which users can navigate with the Wii's wireless controller, Kaplan said.
"The beauty of it is it zooms in and out of areas of the world," she said. "So if you really want to focus on regional news or national news versus international, you just blow up the map of the U.S."
The AP has a two-year contract to provide news and photos to Nintendo and would like to provide multimedia in the future, said Jane Seagrave, vice president of new media markets for the New York-based news cooperative.
The AP will supply news for the Wii in English, French, Spanish, Dutch, German, and Swiss-German, Seagrave said. The Japanese news company Goo will supply Nintendo's Japanese-language news, Kaplan said. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The Wii has been a surprise hit for Nintendo as it competes with Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360 consoles.
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