Article on Nintendo’s video on demand service for Wii in Japan. Particularly interesting to me is that the service will intially only offer original programming designed for groups to “watch together and communicate with each other” as opposed to individual viewing, and that the advertising will be opt-in: “No advertisement is shown on the screen unless the user actively chooses so.”

The idea is that the advertising will be iteractive and personalized, and thus hopefully compelling and mutually beneficial to the users and the advertiser, who can “adjust their products to the real needs of their customers.” I’d be pretty amazed if they can pull that off, but perhaps the Japanese are less cynical about advertising than Americans like me?