The British Broadcasting Corporation has today announced a partnership with Nintendo to bring their iPlayer service to the Nintendo Wii later this year. The iPlayer service lets paying license fee customers access the majority of BBC’s programming through the internet to catch up on missed shows later on.

iPlayer will be available through the Wii’s Opera browser from the end of the month with a dedicated channel being available later this year.

The service will allow people without access to expensive television recording hardware or even an aerial to watch BBC produced shows through the Wii console.

Since launching in March 2007, more than 17 million requests for data have been recieved by iPlayers main servers which certainly means a fairly large customer base!

The announcement is definitely promising for Wii owners everywhere, with more and more third party services being discussed all the time the future looks good for expanded content on the Wii.

Nintendo will be sending out messages to all Wii consoles soon to advertise the service.