WiiWare (US) and Wii Software (Europe) are certainly initiatives to bring original content to the Wii alongside the Virtual Console and Nintendo do appear to be courting smaller developers as well as the likes of EA, Sega and Ubisoft. But nowhere in any of the official announcements has there been any indication that this is akin to XNA or any attempt to bring hobbyist programmers into the fold. I've seen a few news sources repeat this, but it's not what Nintendo said in their Press Release.

There is a huge difference between encouraging professional independant development and allowing anyone with a home computer access to development tools.

Nice work by Nintendo there, encouraging home-brew titles.

Hopefully it'll not be long before someone throws together (or ports) a competent media play which can stream content directly from a PC or NAS, thus making the Wii much more useful as a home entertainment device.

Could this possibly be Nintendo's response to the unofficial Flash API for the Wii version of Opera?

http://www.wiicade.com/api.aspx

There is no indication that this has anything to do with homebrew of hobbyist developers. I very much doubt we will see any new or ported media players from this source. What we will have is independent developers being able to get a game out for 50-100K instead of a few million.

As for fighting back, I hardly think Nintendo are bothered in any way about a few dozen lines of ActionScript which allow some rudimentary button mapping in Flash.

... is deafening. OK, let's see what they come up with by next week, a few hours is perhaps unkind !

With Microsoft and Nintendo offering these tools, surely Sony will do something similar ? This is a good model, anyone remember Atari APX ?