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

[Richard E. Crislip]

Hello Allen

There was another out there at the same tine too. It was called the CD32 by
Commodore. It was base on the Amiga. With a couple of upgrades it bacame an
Amiga. Also before, that Commodore came out with another that was base on
the Amiga 500. It actually was more comtemperary with the Philps product,
just can't recall its name at the moment. They all suffered the same fate.
In my opinion, the buying public had too much of a capital investment in
VHS equipment at the time and these products didn't offer enough of an
improvement to make John Q. Public want to abandon the tape media just yet.
Maybe it was because they couldn't record to it.... whaddaya thnink?

On 01/21/2005, Allen Huffman wrote:
> 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
>
>
Regards
-- 
Criusing on AutoPilot                       |
        With an Amiga           ---o-o-O-o-o---  and a CoCo