The Wii News Channel is targeted for a Saturday launch and will primarily feature top news stories and photographs from The Associated Press.

    Consoles with a broadband Internet connection and the Opera Web browser will be able to access the free news channel, which will present AP news in multiple languages. Japanese-language news will come from a separate agency.

    News will be displayed through an interactive map, which users can navigate with the Wii's wireless controller, said Perrin Kaplan, vice president for marketing at Nintendo's U.S. headquarters in Redmond, Washington.

    "The beauty of it is it zooms in and out of areas of the world," she said. "So if you really want to focus on regional news or national news versus international, you just blow up the map of the U.S."

    The AP will deliver news for the Wii in English, French, Spanish, Dutch, German, and Swiss-German, said Jane Seagrave, vice president of new media markets for the New York-based news agency.

    The AP has a two-year contract to provide news and photos to Nintendo and would like to provide multimedia in the future, she added.

    "It's a very innovative new application of what we're doing generally, which is to try to get our content to new audiences on new platforms," Seagrave explained.

    The Japanese news company Goo will supply Nintendo's Japanese-language news, Kaplan said. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

    The Wii has been a surprise hit for Nintendo in its competition with Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360 consoles.

    A recent report from the market research firm NPD Group said the Wii has sold 1.1 million units since it was released in the U.S. on Nov. 19, with 604,200 of those units sold in December.

    "The Nintendo Wii demographic is definitely a wider demographic than your traditional hardcore gamer," said Billy Pidgeon, a video game industry analyst at IDC in New York. "It kind of makes sense for other types of content to be made available on the Wii."

    (Agencies)