Massive demand for DS TV service causes chaos

The latest DS gadget to get the green light in Japan, but which is unlikely to ever be released in Europe, is a TV adaptor. The add-on went on sale on November 20th, but Nintendo clearly wasn't counting on just how many customers would be rushing to register for the TV service.

According to Japanese site J-Cast News, Nintendo's registration website was struggling to cope with the massive numbers trying to sign themselves up after just two hours of going live. This was despite the product's 'soft launch', involving little publicity.

The TV adaptor uses signals broadcast by Japan's unique mobile terrestrial broadcasting service, 1seg. Compatible mobile phone handsets have been available in Japan since autumn 2005 and Sony released its own 1seg tuner for PSP in September this year.

With 20 million DS consoles sold in Japan, the potential numbers of customers signing up for TV-on-the-move was bound to be huge. But obviously Nintendo hadn't quite banked on exactly how many would.

It's a shame we'd have to literally move overseas in order to check out the service for ourselves. With no analogue tuner planned (one was released for GBA) it seems we'll just have to busy ourselves using our DS for playing games. Imagine that.