We asked Philips Interactive Media of America (PIMA) to describe the kind of money it would take to ship a moderately ambitious new CD-I title. Leaving to one side the cost of the content itself — shooting the video, licensing the rights to existing footage, drawing the animations and so on — here’s how it shapes up.

Staff. You’ll need a core team of a producer, a programmer, a designer and a graphic artist. (With luck, one person may be able to wear two hats.) Plan on paying them for at least six months. That gets you to the master-disc stage; any kind of cash flow from royalties is months past that.

Equipment. Right now, the best development platform is a fast Macintosh with plenty of memory and at least 1.2 gigabytes of disk space. You will probably want to add a sound digitizing board to handle the audio. Digidesign’s Sound Tools is popular; it handles the sampling, PCM coding and the compression into CD-I’s adaptive-differential PCM code (ADPCM), all for $5,000-6,000. If you are incorporating still video, you’ll need that interface.

You’ll need an industrial CD-I player ($3,000). Unless you like flying blind, you’ll want a CD emulator, a tiny computer that builds a bit-for-bit image of the optical disc on its 650-mb Winchester disk, then accurately simulates the access time and data rate of the CD under various conditions ($10,000-12,000).

The Mac could compile the CD-I software you are writing, but it’s comparatively slow at that. For better efficiency, you might want to add a Sun Sparcstation just to run the compiler. It, too, needs a big disk.

Software. Again, we’ll leave aside all the tools you might use to develop scripts, create the drawings and title screens, edit the images and so on. But we should mention that you need a Green Book license from Philips ($5,000). Another necessity is the CD-I compiler from Microware ($1,750). It is also very helpful to license the Balboa run-time code libraries from OptImage ($3,000).

For convenience, you can buy combo hardware/software packs from OptImage. The Media Mogul package for Macintoshes, PCs or Sparcstations includes the CD-I player, a 650-mb hard disk, a range of data format converter tools (e.g., Photoshop plug-ins), a Green Book license and simple scripting software, all for $14,995. It enables you to build CD-Is with simple time-based sequences that are suitable for point-of-sale applications. However, it cannot handle complex programming jobs; OptImage has other packs for advanced developers.

Testing and replication. Once you have a disc image built, you can copy it out to tape and ship it to any of several service bureaus to have a test disc made using write-once media. This costs $1,000 for three-day turnaround service — more if you’re in a rush, less if you can wait two weeks. If the test disc checks out, you would have a glass master disc made ($1,000 for two-week turnaround). From the master, you can press as many copies as you like at about $1.50 apiece for runs of a thousand or so.

Distribution. Now you have to get your masterwork into the stores. At the moment, PIMA is the only agency set up to do that, though if CD-I gets popular there will be many others. PIMA has a variety of price structures: fixed fee, percentage of sales or creative combinations.

Peter Dyson