Like a number of other families we got the Wii console for Christmas this year. I've told a few people about how we hooked my 5 year old son on YouTube.com videos on the Wii. We started with one video and an hour later he was still watching and finding more. Here are the instructions to install the Opera browser and watch YouTube and visit Internet sites on your Wii.

1. Start up to Wii Menu.
2. Hit the Wii Shop icon in the top right.
3. Hit the start button, then the Start Shopping Button. You are now on the "Wii Shop Channel".
4. Choose to "add wii points". Purchase 500 points for $5.
5. Back to the Wii Shop Channel.
6. Choose "Wii Channels" in the upper right.
7. Choose "Internet Channel" and purchase. This will install the Opera browser.
8. Go back to Wii Menu, you now have an Internet Channel icon.
9. Click the Internet Channel icon and then click start.
10. Click Web Addresses and use the onscreen keyboard with the Wii remote to point at the letters and type a url such as www.youtube.com
11. Check out the recommended videos, search for a video, or otherwise get the video you want.
12. The page for that video will come up. To go to full screen hit the pause icon first, then the fullscreen button. Otherwise you will have two out of synch audio streams.
13. Make the full screen complete by hiding the nav buttons on the bottom of the screen. This is done by hitting the 1 button on the Wii remote.
14. Full screen can also be achived by hitting the + button on the Wii remote. This acts as zoom. Then use the arrows on the directional pad on top of the Wii remote to center the screen. This sometimes works better than the other full screen method for YouTube. You can do this on any site of course.
15. You can invoke fancy scrolling by holding down the B key and keeping it down. This is cool, but very sensitive.
16. Press the 1 button to get your nav bar back. Then do something else, like click on the www icon to enter the address of a different web site.

I was involved in some webTV offerings such as AOLTV back in the day. The effect here is similar. There are some major advantages in today's world. The first is YouTube. This opens up more and better content and appeals to a younger audience. The webTV apps sold to the older demo who were less comfortable with computers but somehow thought WebTV would be easier or better. The wireless network in the home is also a big boost. As a $5 add on to a device that is already owned the price is unbeatable. Bigger TVs help. Unlike AOLTV, this won't be the primary access point. It will be a way to check in between games or while in the kids room. Finally, content created for mobile devices works very well in the TV screen format. Yahoo.com can be a little rough on a TV screen, but m.yahoo.com is brilliant. m.twitter.com is nice, but twitter.com with two zooms is actually better. m.wsj.com. is a favorite.

It's all kind of nifty and good for consumers to have another access point that works well. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that anyone is making money from the innovation, other than a few pennies for Opera and Nintendo.

You can also plug a usb keyboard into the Wii. If fact, I wrote this post on the Wii itself with a keyboard. The onscreen keyboard is pretty good so you don't need a usb keyboard unless you somehow ending up sending long email from it. So if I haven't crashed the buffer on the onscreen keyboard app this post should be done.