[Coco] "Historic" CD-i development systems...

[Allen Huffman]

On Jan 20, 2005, at 10:09 PM, Thierry Mella wrote:
> May I ask you why the Phillips CD-i wasn't a commercial success ?
> (In Europe, it was a big failure !)

I can only speculate, but I think the biggest problem was the price.  
Wasn't it around $1000 when it came out?  And from those who worked on 
it, I hear Phillips wasn't interested in pushing it as a gaming 
platform, which is a pity -- had we seen a CD-i 2 or something, maybe 
that WOULD have been a big success.

They had big plans early on tho.  I recall talking to a Phillips rep 
who was showing CD-i off at a store in Lufkin, TX where I lived and he 
told me of the plans with Blockbuster to have satellites where they 
could download movies and burn them to VideoCDs -- any movie, any time. 
  Just an amazing idea.  And I thought VCDs were great.  CD-i was even 
selling at Sears, and when I moved to Iowa you could buy CD-i titles 
(1995) at Best Buy.

But:

1) who wanted to play games on some TV set machine off of CD? Silly!  
Until Sega CD did it...

2) who wanted to watch movies on a disc?  Silly!  Until DVDs came out...

So, too much, too early, I think.

CD-i was ahead of it's time.  And did you know that another CD-i 
wannabe was created by Microsoft, and distributed through the US's #1 
electronics store, Radio Shack?  Radio Shack, at the time, had more 
stores than there were McDonald's, and the V.I.S. (Video Information 
System?) was on display at the front of all RS stores, even the tiny 
one in the crappy mall where I had my store -- so I got to watch that 
stupid "Hooty Hoot" owl demo for months.

They had 100+ programs on launch!  Cheaper!  In more stores!

And it bombed, while CD-i lived on for years afterwards.

Kinda weird.  'course, VIS sucked -- some 286 machine running a 40 
column version of Windows 3, I think.  I should look it up.  I played 
with it alot at that RadShack but never knew much about it.

		-- Allen