Game Boy Advance Video

Game Boy Advance Video is a video format that allows you to watch TV shows on your Game Boy Advance or Nintendo DS (but not the Game Boy Player). GBA Video paks started coming out in North America in May 2004 and featured a variety of shows from Nickelodeon, Disney, Cartoon Network, some 4Kids-dubbed anime, and other brands. In 2005, Three movie paks containing Shrek, Shrek 2 and Shark Tale were released on GBA Video, all licensed by DreamWorks.

Why It Flopped

 * 1) Because of the memory limitations on a GBA cartridge, the video and audio are heavily compressed. This is especially bad on the movie paks.
 * 2) For TV shows, each pak only had 2-4 episodes and costed around $20. Nowadays for the same price, you can buy an entire season of a show in much higher quality from digital video services such as iTunes, Google Play, or Amazon.
 * 3) Meanwhile, each GBA Video pak for movies costed around $30. Nowadays that's the common price of a movie on the Ultra HD Blu Ray format.
 * 4) The resolution is awful, even on such a small screen. The video quality is comparable to a very old YouTube video and a cutscene of a Sega CD game.
 * 5) It's incompatible with the Game Boy Player due to the possibility that users could pirate the footage by plugging their GameCube into a VCR and recording the footage onto a VHS tape. Even if the GBA Video was compatible with the Game Boy Player, the resolution would look awful on a TV screen because again, it already looks bad enough on a small screen.
 * 6) Visual artifacts marring nearly every frame.
 * 7) Lots of noticeable color bleeding.
 * 8) Very low frame rate that's especially noticeable in the movie paks.
 * 9) Movies released on combo paks look even worse than they do on their individual paks.
 * 10) Despite being a Nintendo video format, the only Nintendo cartoon released on GBA video was Pokémon. A GBA Video pak of Kirby: Right Back at Ya! was reportedly planned but cancelled.
 * 11) The Shrek and Shark Tale and Shrek and Shrek 2 combo packs are even more compressed than the other movie paks. They run at 112p instead of 240p, mainly due to the said memory limitations.
 * 12) The names of the Cartoon Network Collection paks are inconsistent. The first two are numbered, but the other four were labelled "Limited Edition", "Platinum Edition", "Premium Edition", and "Special Edition" despite being very similar to the first two.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) It was considered somewhat acceptable when it was first released. Back then, portable DVD players were expensive and not quite as portable, and downloading movies and TV shows on a mobile device wasn't a thing yet. Plus, it was pretty innovative to watch movies and TV shows on a portable game system, and this concept was revisited by Sony with their UMD Video format for the mh:awesomegames:PlayStation Portable, which was more successful and had a wider selection of titles available.
 * 2) Game Boy Advance Video paks were given different packaging to differentiate them from regular GBA games.
 * 3) Most of the shows and movies released on the format are good, with the only poor ones being Dragon Ball GT and Shark Tale.
 * 4) While it's not compatible with the Game Boy Player, it is compatible with the Nintendo DS and Nintendo DS Lite through backwards compatibility, as well as GBA Emulators like VisualBoyAdvance.

Trivia

 * It became a meme for how bad it is, such as the YouTube video "Shrek, but in Game Boy Video".

Videos
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