Nintendo: 1 million Netflix users on Wii

Almost 1 million Wii owners have "participated" in the Netflix movie streaming system in the US, according to comments by Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime.

Speaking on CNBC, as reported by Yahoo! Finance, Fils-Aime's figure implied a faster sign-up rate than the Xbox 360, which took around three months to reach the same figure.

This success flies in the face of analyst predictions that the Wii launch of the service would have only a limited impact. Previously Webush Securities' Michael Pachter predicted that "the Wii installed base will embrace the Netflix service only gradually".

Pachter estimated that less than 20 per cent of Wii users were connected online, compared to 75 to 80 per cent for the Xbox 360. However, a recent study by The Diffusion Group suggested that the figure for the Wii was actually as high as 54 per cent.

With more than 30 million Wii consoles sold in the US though, the take up so far for Netflix is still only a small percentage of the total possible audience.

The Wii service was launched on April 12 and unlike its implementation on the Xbox 360 requires a disc provided by Netflix and does not display films in HD. The PlayStation 3 also required a Blu-ray disc to run the software at launch.