Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!lll-winken!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!decwrl!mcnc!ncsuvx!news From: kdarling@hobbes.ncsu.edu (Kevin Darling) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy Subject: Which market for CDTV? Message-ID: <1991Feb11.055244.3316@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu> Date: 11 Feb 91 05:52:44 GMT References: <1991Feb10.103752.1@ccvax.iastate.edu> <1991Feb10.211625.24078@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu> Sender: news@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu (USENET News System) Organization: NCSU Computing Center Lines: 73 In <1991Feb10.211625.24078@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu> in amiga.hardware rjc@geech.ai.mit.edu (Ray Cromwell) writes: | [much quoting deleted] | Here is where the controversy starts. With all this "superior" hardware | CD-I must be expensive. Perhaps almost $2000. Good thinking, but no :-). See, there's a reason CDTV is priced at $1000: that's the long-planned introductory price of most CD-I units. Background: 2 or 3 years ago when RAM and hardware costs were much higher, Sony/Philips intended to subsidize early buyers by selling at an intro price of $999.99, even tho it should be more. But costs have since dropped. Also, it was originally planned that CD-I players would fall to around $450 within a couple of years of intro... and I suspect that's even more true now. In addition, Motorola has committed to creating new CD-I chipsets. | Commodore has stated that they are awaiting the MPEG standard Everyone is :-). Virtually all will be using that for full-motion video. CD-I players using preliminary versions have already been demo'd, I hear. |Another thing people are overlooking is that CD-I has to compete |with DVI which both IBM and Apple are going to support. No, the markets are different. CD-I is for standalone units, DVI is intended as a personal computer addon. There will be some minor crossover, perhaps. Apple doesn't like CD-I partly because it relies on a multitasking OS, and it's not theirs ;-). The other beef was that it was based on a 68000. In any case, you won't see Apple trying to do a CDTV-like thing; they're smart enough to stay out of a mass-consumer-market feature/price war. Also, while we're here, adds in another article: | If C= can get some market share before CD-I comes out, and | then licence the technology to others, it will succeed. If CDTV had come out last fall as first announced, it might have gotten some kind of market share; altho the original prophecy that "a hundred" discs would also be ready by then, was humorous. Good titles take huge amounts of work. As for licensing... license to whom???! Nobody is left! ;-). | These units are probably for the Japanese home market, and only marginally | affects what will happen here in the U.S.. Wow. We must live on different planets :-). Seriously, the first units will be intro'd in Japan, and then hit the US shortly thereafter. As for the Beta/VHS comparisons -- understandable, as that's about the only handy historical comparison; but it's pretty invalid in this case. This time we have the _creators_ of CDROM and CD-A issuing another new global standard, CD-I. Not following it is akin to creating your own one-off, inferior DAT standard. The marketplace won't like it. Also keep in mind: Sony and Matsushita bought up Columbia, MCA, CBS, etc. Guess why? They _own_ the rights to a huge amount of raw material now. They've also implemented US groups to do R&D on interactive software over radio, TV, and ISDN. Someone jokingly said "juggernaut". You were right. Finally, back to rjc@geech.ai.mit.edu (Ray Cromwell) and the _real_ crux: | Commodore has a lot of elbow room in the options to market CDTV. It | could be the video-game hit of the century, or a 'cheap' alternative. THAT is the key: to find a niche for CDTV. It won't be the cheap alternative. It's also extremely unlikely that it would succeed as a $1000 video game. However, its main (only?) strong point is that it's supposedly "easy" to create homebrew titles on normal Amigas. This is really where discussion should center: the non-mass-consumer markets. But it's tricky: For example, I once suggested that with a future Amiga/WORM drive, an educator could create discs for use on CDTV players in a classroom... then someone shot that down by asking why a school would buy $1000 _players_, instead of, say, a bunch of more capable CDROM-equipped A500's. Thoughts?? Regards - kevin