CDTV Wows CES!
John,
Judging from your reaction to CDTV, you must never have seen a demo of
CD-I, which has been worked on for the last 4 years. Same exact concept,
only with Sony, Philips, Hitachi, Matsushita, and dozens of others for
backing.
The industrial CD-I players are already shipping, and it's only pure luck
that CBM is going to be able to get away with their claim of being the
"first consumer-oriented" multitasking audio-video home box…. the CD-I
home units were due out in 1988 but were delayed for various reasons,
including finally catching up to DVI by now adding realtime fullscreen
video decompression. They're now due in mid-1991. In any event, for CBM to
claim credit for this "revolutionary" idea is total ad hype/bunk. I myself
used a CD-I player in Sept, 1988.
I do agree that this kind of device is really neat. But you are not alone
in wondering if it will take off…. this has been debated for years in the
CD-I/CDROM community. Obviously CBM went with the pro arguments <grin>. I
would also suspect that they've approached quite a few CD-I developers to
port their apps over. Otherwise I think talk of a 100 titles by year's end
would be rather over-optimistic.
So the question is: when it comes down next year to CBM vs
rest-of-the-world (CD-I), will the early CDTV buyers feel that they went
with the wrong horse?