YouTube finally comes to the Wii

Google has announced that a YouTube app is now available for the Nintendo Wii in the United States.

The app will then roll out in other countries over the next few months.

A Google blog post revealed why bringing YouTube to the Wii was such a challenge.

"When we began building the new YouTube app for the Nintendo Wii, we wanted to make video playback smooth and beautiful," it read. "This meant squeezing the most available power from the console CPU and fitting the video decoding process within the tight bounds of available memory.

"After trying out several video encoding formats on Wii, we found that 360p WebM encoding performed the best.

"With the largest install base of current generation consoles, YouTube on Wii is the largest deployment of WebM video in the world today."

The app arrives just as the Wii U is gearing up for launch around the world. The YouTube app will be available on Wii U.