Nintendo Australia today announced an all-new channel for the Wii, Nintendo Channel. Essentially this is strictly a Nintendo-specific news channel that will keep you up-to-date on all things Nintendo, Wii and DS related. The channel is free to download and will be made available from the Wii Shop Channel from tomorrow, May 30.

The channel will feature trailers and videos as well as downloadable demos (even for your DS), as well as offering up a community aspect where you can recommend games you've played. You can find out more about the Nintendo Channel by checking out the press release right here on AusGamers.

Isn't this the channel that spies on your Wii or something?

Spies? Are you really paranoid or something?

Sounds kinda boring anyway.

I bet it takes way too long to start too, and you can only see recommendations from people who you've added on with the new 96 digit friend code.

I installed it yesterday, It's kind of nifty but it also happened just after we hit our bandwidth limit and thus was shaped so I got kinda cut at waiting for video kind of things to load.

Nice to be able to use the Wii as a DS demo download station though.

It kinda does spy on the Wii, but only what games you've played and how many times you've played and for how long. There's also a short and fairly shallow survey section where you can rate the games, which is kind of neat but when it said "tell us stuff" with a little mail icon I thought it was going to allow for more substantial feedback. Although I'm sure they picked survey because it's less likely to be abused.

Best part of the survey is when you grab the slider to rate a game, it starts a drum roll that pans with the left and right stereo and ends with a nice crash cymbal.

Another nicety is that if a game has a website, there's a link to open it up in Opera.

For the whole "it spies on your wii" problem, you can actually disagree with the agreement they put and they'll just not monitor you. I myself don't like the idea of Nintendo probing my wii usage (or using extra bandwidth for that matter) so I just said "I don't agree." They still let you use the channel and everything.