Philips promises 50 titles by Christmas

Amid the usual hype and glitz, Philips introduced (finally!) its Compact Disc Interactive (CD-I) player on October 16. The player, attractively styled and carrying a suggested list price of $799, is already on display in more than a thousand retail outlets, including Sears, Circuit City, Silo and the like.

Philips also rolled out two dozen titles. Between now and year’s end, Philips Interactive Media of America (PIMA, the content arm of the Philips
CD-I organization) plans to release more than 50 titles, all priced between $19.95 and $59.95. By next fall, Philips promises to have more than 100.

TOYS FOR COUCH POTATOES

As we’ve noted here in the past, CD-I has little to palpitate the hearts of techno-weenies. Rather, it’s aimed at the couch potato crowd — those who will try anything as long as it’s no more complex than watching television. Judging from the list of discs that PIMA announced, this audience falls into three broad classes.

Preschool children. Two-thirds of the list is aimed at the under-age-6 generation. Their moms will be persuaded that the discs are not only good entertainment, but an investment in reading readiness. The basic arguments here are first, there is a lot of quality material in these discs, and second, the interactivity of the new medium redeems it from being an expensive variation on the electronic babysitter.

There’s merit to these arguments. For example, Jack “Batman” Nicholson is wonderful as the narrator for Kipling’s How the Camel Got His Hump. There are also little quizzes you can take about the stories. In Cartoon Jukebox, the viewer can paint the characters in a cartoon, then watch them go through an animated skit wearing those colors.

Knowing that preschoolers lack the finger dexterity to manipulate a remote control, Philips came up with a giant, brightly colored Roller Controller. Its trackball is about 6 inches in diameter; there are only two buttons; and it’s all indestructible plastic. The accessory hasn’t been priced yet, but it will be available by Christmas.

Older kids. A fair number of video games have been ported from the computer world: Dark Castle, Deja Vu, Pinball, Backgammon, Sargon (the chess program) and others. Nintendo will license some of its famous characters, including the Mario Brothers, Donkey Kong and Zelda. Grownup kids may prefer games such as The Palm Springs Open and Caesar’s World of Gambling.

Our take is that the games are not badly done, but they are just video games. The story lines are the same as you’d get running on a PC or a Macintosh, though the detail in the scenery is much better. (In Palm Springs Open, the makers took a video snapshot of the course every ten yards. In Battleship, after you enter the coordinates for the next shot, you are treated to an appropriate motion-video clip from an old war-at-sea movie: great triple guns thundering, submarines shaking from depth charges — all the cliches.) But the games don’t do anything new with the CD-I medium. The main advantage to CD-I, we think, is that you don’t tie up the family computer to play your game. Instead, you tie up the family TV.

Coffee-table books. Many of the discs fall into the “museum catalog” genre: the paintings of Van Gogh, a tour of the Smithsonian and so on. They are collections of still images supplemented with audio commentary. Others are “illustrated records”: CD audio tracks supplemented with still images, facts about the performers and song lyrics that scroll in sync to the music.

We found these the least appealing of the lot, perhaps because they are so unimaginative. Interactivity is limited to picking the period of Van Gogh’s life to view or turning lyrics on or off. The only other thing you can do is decide when to quit.

WHERE’S THE BANDWAGON?

Companies introducing a new kind of product are usually anxious to show that there is a bandwagon of third-party support. Philips made a point of this on the hardware side; it announced that Sony and Matsushita will market competing players.

However, word from a recent Japanese consumer electronics show, the annual Audio Fair in Tokyo, is that nearly all the major Japanese consumer electronics firms have working prototypes of CD-I or CD-I combi-players, but none have firm plans to release them into U.S. channels. Matsushita said in a recent trade journal report only that it “might” ship a CD-I player in Japan by early 1992, with no commitment to a timeline for the U.S. market. Sony’s Shari Haber, marketing manager for consumer electronics products, says Sony has not finalized plans for introducing CD-I in the U.S. All are obviously waiting to gauge CD-I’s success before taking the leap.

If and when the Japanese players do arrive on U.S. shores, they should set off a round of price cuts, giving some pricing headroom for the next generation of CD-I full-motion video players (using MPEG compression), which Philips claims will be introduced in the fall of 1992.

Quiet about third parties. Strangely, Philips was rather quiet about titles from third parties. In part, that’s because PIMA has been so successful in signing up developers; there aren’t many interested producers who are still independent. The really small fry who might want to enter the market are held back by the amount of money needed — $200,000 and up by Philips’s own estimates. Furthermore, until a few months ago there were few production tools for developers to use, delaying the arrival of any independents that might exist.

While the success of CD-I will be determined over the coming months by how well the public likes the titles that Philips has lined up, we think that the long-run vitality of the medium will depend on some innovative products from producers outside the Philips fold. Diversity is key; CD-I’s real competition is cable TV.

Peter Dyson