Nintendo is calling August the "Month of Metroid" to promote the upcoming Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, being released on August 27th. A new channel has been made available in the Wii Shop, promising the ability to watch videos, but they are not downloaded to the system. Instead, a small player interface is downloaded that provides a Metroid-themed interface to watch videos and look at some artwork. The videos appear to be streamed, as there were occasional hiccups in the video. The compression is light, without the plague of blocks and smudges that appear on most online video services. Two videos are available to watch now, with two more being available on August 13th.

Nintendo is demonstrating the ability to have preview videos available for everyone on their system, and hopefully a similar service will be implemented for previews of Virtual Console titles. Currently in the Wii Shop channel you are told to go to Wii.com to watch preview videos, but today's release shows that this process isn't absolutely necessary.

Nintendo is slowly expanding their online presence. With the obvious lack of playable demos, they are still behind the other major players, but hopefully Nintendo is just remaining quiet on the issue, and not ignoring it altogether.