Nobody streams at Blu-ray bit rates.  It's absolutely pointless to do so.   The highest bit rate I've found from any stream provider is 10.5 mbps and that's for the highest quality 1920 x 1080 movies.

Nobody will be streaming 4k video feeds at Blu-ray bit rates.  Nobody.

Yeah, one can buy a 3 TB external HDD for the Wii U but it's kind of silly to not being included in the first place.

TO ALL:
I'm not trying say it wouldn't have been a nice addition to have but the Mt Everest some of you guys are making out of this pebble in the road is ridiculous.   Even more so because of the lack of understanding of Wi-Fi technology on display in this thread that is being spouted out of ignorance is making the network administrator inside me face palm at every other post.

If you have a good router and a good ISP and the router isn't several rooms away from your gaming room, Wi-Fi will operate just fine.   You'll never notice the difference between it and a wired connection.

If you have a bad Wi-Fi connection, this could be your router, your ISP or the location of the router.  In that case, just buy the damn dongle.

Care to loan me your magic crystall ball? Technology goes forward, higher bandwiths will be available. We will see later next gen if there will be streaming with moderate compression.

That's the most ridiculous comparison ever. Congrats on missing the point completely.

Most people don't have or need 3 TB. Most people use ethernet, and if they don't it is the best possible solution for multiplayer gaming.

This whole "It is a small problem" is irrelevant. Most people who buy a Wii U probaly won't even play online. That doesn't make an ethernet port useless.

I don't need a crystal ball.  What I need are the trade journals I read that show everybody working on more compressions schemes.  Nobody wants to run uncompressed streams when you don't need to.  You throw away bandwidth for nothing.  

Do any music streaming services stream red book audio?  No, of course not.

Please tell me where I said it was useless?  In fact, I specifically stated, "I'm not trying say it wouldn't have been a nice addition to have".

I'd appreciate it if you didn't put words in my mouth.

Who said anything about uncompressed? The post you quoted said moderate compression, like in bluray disks.

I'd appreciate it if you didn't put words in my mouth.

For streaming, that's considered uncompressed from the source material.  You used Blu-ray as the "source".  That high bit rate will never be streamed because it's a waste of bandwidth.   

The whole point of streaming anything is to provide the ability to as many people as possible to consume your content.  Using a data stream that only Finland can enjoy isn't economicaly fruitful.   But more to the point is that you don't have to use that bit rate to get a picture quality so close you can't even tell it's not the original source content.  

Content providers pay money for the bandwidth they utilize.   Why would you want to pay 5-10 times the money to provide content that won't gain you 5-10 times the revenue?

Well, I am, but I don't get why they need 1gb internet when they have this:

Now I'm curious runqvist... which screen do you use for your gaming?

That is your opinion. If you can't see the difference, too bad.

Surely you are aware of those companies who stream mostly to scandinavian countries?  They might want to have an advantage against multinational companies like netflix, better streams could be just that. At least in Finland and Sweden we do have the infrastructure for those kind of bitrates.

Uh, duh. Do they pay? Herp derp.

Then why the comparison with a 3TB HDD?

No one's putting words in your mouth. You compare with something like that then you automatically contradict yourself.

Besides I said ethernet port is not useless just because not all the people who use a console use it. Whereas your post says the opposite by saying it is not such a big issue. When I never said it is a big issue anyway.