![]() I wonder if I can track that down on the interwebs.įun aside: a CD-I video disc of Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan was my first exposure to Trek. I used to have a CD-I infomercial on VHS featuring a giant, talking screen called “The Wall”. It was probably a smart move, though, considering the only other person I knew with a CD-I at home was the daughter of the VP overseeing that division. I don’t know whether that was the original vision or a pivot based on lousy sales. I wish I still had them.Īt the time, my dad had told me the CD-I’s primary market was commercial, e.g., interactive training, demo kiosks, media stations in libraries, etc. Most of my discs had simple white labels, and I’m pretty sure many of them were never actually released. I even had an infrared gun controller and a really, really low-quality VR headset driven by dark little CRTs (I think?). ![]() My dad was a marketing exec at Philips back in the ‘90s, so I had a couple of CD-I units at home, and a ton of games. At the time, digital media itself was new, and the idea of a dedicated digital disc based encyclopedia / magazine made sense. It was not until the reality of CD-I players being sold that the necessity for games and the zero interest in educational media became clear. A lot of the CD-I development was centered around the consumer / end-user never having to wait, which was accomplished through a special real time media file format that effectively turned the disc into a single 740 MB file. ![]() ![]() They underestimated the advance of network speeds as well as the public's willingness to wait for the network. They were betting that the network speed and general public adoption of the Internet was going to be slower, with a disc based interactive media period. At the time, Philips was betting that encyclopedias, educational and subscription publications would be on discs. To be fair, where the article focuses on video games, the CD-I player was never intended to be a game machine. I was one of the lead developers at Philips Interactive Media. ![]()
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