YouTube comes to Nintendo Switch, but Nintendo continues bad history with video streaming

Nintendo’s Switch finally got a dedicated YouTube app yesterday, bringing the world’s most popular video streaming platform to one of the most popular consoles of this generation. However, many fans are still unhappy with the state of streaming on the Switch. Looking at Nintendo’s history with streaming services, it’s not hard to see why.

The Nintendo Switch has been out for 20 months now, but video streaming has been a veritable wasteland. Hulu offered a native app about 7 months after the console’s March 2017 launch. Since then, there has only been silence from major streaming services like YouTube, Netflix, and Amazon Video. Now that YouTube is on board, the absence of Amazon and Netflix is more apparent now than ever.

While apps for streaming services certainly don’t make or break a gaming console, they are expected to be present, especially considering that every console since the last generation had them As Brad Linder of Liliputing pointed out, Nintendo’s Wii (which was released in 2006) still has working apps for Amazon Video, Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube. Nintendo has announced that they will be killing those services at the end of January 2019, but as it stands today, the Nintendo Wii offers more streaming services than the Switch. If you’re a Netflix or Amazon Prime customer, the Wii and Wii U are better options than the Switch for media consumption at the moment.

Nintendo has yet to announce plans to bring Netflix and/or Amazon to the Switch, but that doesn’t preclude the possibility of those services coming to the platform. With streaming services shutting down on the Wii and YouTube finally coming to the Switch, Nintendo may be taking a hard look at the experience it’s offering on its current console outside of gaming.

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