What is DVD playback?

What was Nintendo's reasoning for restricting DVD playback on the Wii?

• Given that every Wii has a DVD drive inside, why did Nintendo choose to restrict DVD playback? Given that it would make it more competitive with the Xbox or Playstation, one would think DVD functionality would be an easy way to add value to the system and make the platform one that people turned to more often. If users would be booting the Wii to play DVDs, they'd be more likely to fire up a game or the Wii store. As is, I haven't booted my Wii in months. If it played DVDs, I'm sure I'd be playing more games, which would translate to buying more games. It seems like removing functionality that is built into your hardware is a poor business decision.

• Answer:

  Two reasons: 1 - To keep costs down, as they would have had to pay licensing fees. Nintendo didn't "remove" functionality, they chose not to add it because they did not want to pay. 2 - They didn't need to. The Wii was released in 2006 and at that time the market that the Wii was shooting for already had at least one DVD player in their home. DVD Movie playback was a big selling point for the Playstation 2, but that was in 2000. I'm not even sure why you'd be questioning this decision based on hindsight, in two forms: 1 - The Wii sold like crazy, so Nintendo's decision is easily justifiable. It's slowed down in more recent years, but do you really think that's because of the lack of DVD playback in the era of Netflix Instant (which it does support)? 2 - The video playback format war was fought by the Playstation 3 and the XBox 360, and it wasn't even over DVD, it was between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.  And even though Microsoft lost that battle by betting (badly) on the wrong format, the XBox is the market share leader between those two. So, this battle didn't even matter.