The Nintendo Switch launched without any video streaming apps, and it took over six months before the first was released: Hulu.
And now Hulu has revealed why. Julian Eggebrecht, who is the vice president of technology at Hulu (who also serves as president of developer Factor 5), said that it was a political decision by Nintendo not to offer certain features at launch.
He said that video streaming services need an encryption feature that the Switch had built-in, but Nintendo decided to lock that feature until recently (mainly to focus on games).
Eggebrecht told IGN in a recent episode of Nintendo Voice Chat:
“That was a political decision by Nintendo to a certain degree, but also a technical one because they really wanted to focus on the game-side of things on the one hand, and secondly really were only able to provide the basic technical functionality that you needed to make the greatest games on the new console.” he said.
He added, “one of the things which was missing until recently was one tiny little bit of encryption that most of the professional video services unfortunately need, and once that was unblocked for us, it was not a problem to get the whole thing going.”
Hopefully this means that Netflix and Amazon will be ready with their streaming apps shortly.
