Why CDTV failed?

[Juz400]

Just watched this from a link on Exxos, I think it explains Alot, could the CDTV have been quite the contribution to CBM`s Demise?
So much money to build them and just have them sit gathering dust..

[ Show youtube player ]

If only top brass had waited until the CR was ready, That looks a bloody Good machine to have had!
CD and Floppy right off the bat, IDE HDD interface and video expansion? SIGN ME UP!!!

I would have marketed the machine along these lines

Bought your family a computer?
(picture parents nodding yes)

Did it get banished to a back room because of the headache inducing picture and noise?
(picturing parents in a dingy/dark room nodding again holding thier ears in pain with something like an Amstrad PC1512 at full volume)
(Screeching, Buzzing and blooping some truely awfull music in the background)

Well its here, the New Commodore CDTV, the next evolution of the best selling Amiga line of computers, designed for the front room!
The Amigas hundreds of games and productivity software with amazing Graphics and Sound now with the Huge 650 MEGABYTES of data and crystal clear audio of compact disk!
(picturing the CDTV in a big stereo stack system and the picture on a huge TV, audio coming from some floorstanding speakers)
(with music along the lines of Red Sector Megademo Hard to rock blasting)
(Flashing up lots of screenshots of games playing and other software and thier audio at a lower level)
(Family furiuosly playing Games, DPaint, Music, doing homework and lots of family togetherness/interaction)

And when you need a rest from all that excitment you can just sit back and relax just pop in your favorite music CDs
(picturing Parents worn out, flaking out on the sofa and blipping the remote to produce some classical music, bliss on faces)

With Floppy, CD Player and Hard Drive storage, Its a real computer, We have everything covered!
The Future is here! Only Amiga makes it possible!
(Dougnut Media style `lightning` and the CDTV closeup)

que millions of sales....

[Seiya]

Amiga CDTV Encyclopedia was in Amiga Style, Encarta was more professional also for a advanced gui that sometimes was very difficult to use. Amiga gui in CDTV was more for family and in some product not bad as idea.

Sometimes this family interface and Amiga resources, however, not allowed to make more ambitious projects

[d4rk3lf]

Still no luck in converting my ham6 video into cdxl format.
I tried yesterday with CD TV development kit, but couldn't figure out anything.
The other thing I've looked into is a new app AGABlaster, and it seems to be great, but it seems to be only for Win10 (not 7, that I have)...

So, from my (poor) knowledge so far, here is the workflow:

1) You download mp4 from youtube, or get an mp4, from whatever source...
2) Convert that mp4 to some uncompressed avi, and wav (and now you must decide to play with res, and fps, and wav samples), and you export separately avi and wav (I did that with After Effects)
3) You grab that avi into virtual dub, and convert it along specifications of AV2HV app (fortunately only avi, wave was good from After Effects).
4) Now you download AV2HV app, type in the command prompt (there's no any UI) specific lines to join avi and wav into a ham6/8 single file
5) You download from aminet app hamview and copy to your Amiga. Of course, app don't have any UI, so you need to type a bunch of commands in shell (that I figure out from youtube clips), and there you go - it works
------
This is where I figured it out... and here I stopped.. here I couldn't make it further...
Sorry about my rambling on great apps that don't have UI's, I wasn't attacking these great apps... it's just.. well... I will tell you later...
---------

Now, in order that video works on CDTV, I've read a ton's of threads, and basically:
6) You need to download the CDTV Development Kit, and somehow install it (I never figured it out)
7) You need to create CDXL from your Ham video from Development Kit (again, probably no UI.. nothing... just read and try to figure it out).
Oh yeah, no youtube tutorial on that, that I found.
8) With that CDXL, you need to create bootable CD from CDTV development kit, in order to CDTV recognize it.
9) You load that ISO CD in Winuae, and you figure out... well.. this is too slow... let's try 10 fps instead of 15...let's go to step 2.

No wonder there are not much CDTV movies.

I expected it would be like 3, or 4 steps of converting, but this is crazy.

I wonder why there's no PC app (with very simple UI) that could accept uncompressed avi, and then turn them to either ham6/8, or cdxl (ham6/8), or cdtv, cd32 bootable?

Or even that great AV2HV app if it could create bootable cdxl (as far as I understood, only one file is needed to create cdtv bootable), it would make life much easier.

[Minuous]

@d4rk3lf:

It's an Amiga program, why would it require Windows 10?

[LongLifeA1200]

Somehow, I keep forgetting the CDTV existed.

Originally Posted by 005AGIMA

It took a geek device and made it a desirable box that would look in place in any loungeroom of the period.

When you put it that way, no wonder it couldn't find its intended audience. Nerds are not looking for computers in the HI-FI section and people in the HI-FI department are not looking for computers.

Originally Posted by DrBong

Bruce worked on The Connoisseur Fine Art Collection for the CDTV and then Word Construction Set for Amiga OCS-ECS/CD32 (see HERE for more info.).

The CD version of 'Word Construction Set' is amazing. Though, was there a way to save progress?

Originally Posted by Amigajay

CDTV can only do 150k/s

That would put it ~5x faster than the read speed of a floppy disk according to Ross' estimates.

So, at a minimum, 2.5kB of data streamed every frame.

Maybe there could be other practical uses for it in games on the CDTV.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by LongLifeA1200

When you put it that way, no wonder it couldn't find its intended audience. Nerds are not looking for computers in the HI-FI section and people in the HI-FI department are not looking for computers.

Yes, this was the problem in a nutshell. It was a product looking for a market - that didn't exist. The other problem is it wasn't advanced enough to excite developers and users.

During development of the CDTV Commodore nicknamed it the 'baby', which suggests it was a 'concept' rather than a properly planned commercial product. It's like some engineer thought "Hey, I could take this old A500 motherboard, bolt on a CDROM drive, and turn it into a Hi-Fi CD player. Wouldn't that be cool! And it could load data off the CD too, making it a 'multimedia' machine like CDi. Take that, Philips!" without considering whether there was a viable market for it.

I don't know what the actual motivation for producing the CDTV was, but it seems that Commodore's engineers worked on many different projects that were their 'babies', as if there was plenty of money for R&D so it wasn't a problem. If I was an engineer working for Commodore I probably would have jumped at the chance to work on such a cool project too, and who cares about marketing - that's not my department.

The other problem is the management seemed to have an optimistic idea of the Amiga's capabilities, whereas developers were painfully aware of its limitations. A CD has enormous storage capacity, but at 1x speed the data transfer rate isn't good enough for FMV etc., and ChipRAM has limited bandwidth. The CDTV did have DMA from the CD drive which helped, but it really needed some FastRAM to keep the CPU speed up.

Multimedia is all about content - the more the better. In those days it took an enormous amount of work to fill a CD. Developers should have been able to concentrate on that without worrying about whether the machine could handle it, and they shouldn't have needed to be genius coders to make it work.

The Connoisseur Fine Art Collection was originally programmed in CanDO. I was given the task of speeding it up, which I did by reproducing the functionality in assembler to free up memory, which then allowed me to preload and cache the pictures while playing sampled music in the background. The pictures were displayed in HAM6 format which sucked bandwidth, so the code had to be as efficient as possible. Commodore was impressed by what I achieved, but this was part of the problem. "The Amiga is amazing!", they said, "look what it can do in the hands of a skilled programmer!". And the myth continued, while other developers were frustrated by the machine's poor performance.

The CD version of 'Word Construction Set' is amazing. Though, was there a way to save progress?

It's been so long I can't remember. I still have the source code around somewhere so I will have a look at it.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

but at 1x speed the data transfer rate isn't good enough for FMV

It is 'good enough' the FMV specs were designed around the Philips CDi 1x CD drive, the company behind the MPEG compressions weren't really happy as they had to compromise on the bitrate and image quality, both for the CD speed and disc size.


In theory the quality for the CD32 MPEG cartridge could have been alot better for the 2x drive but the standard was already now set and again disc space would have meant only 36mins a disc instead of the 72min which already needed two discs for most movies.

[ScottC2010]

I remember it being just too expensive, add to that the incompatibility with a lot of 1mb games and ocs instead of ecs. It was actually cheaper to buy a 500+ and then the A570 drive so most amiga owners (And anyone who read computer mags) waited for that. I bought mine though in 1994 for £150 after i sold my amiga the previous year so that I could buy a Super Famicom. I still use it today now with loads of extra memory and kick 3.1 etc.

I wonder if someone could adapt cinepak V1.2 which is what the mega-cd used (A modified version) to create some of the fmv games like rebel assault and tomcat alley - it should be able to, even if only in 32 colours or ehb.

I think if it had had the full spec of the 500+ and the same expansion card slot and shipped with 2mb chip and maybe a better processor plus some better advertising it might have done better. An MPEG cartridge would have helped too. (They should have shipped the 500/600 with 2MB as well as hd floppy and either a 68010 or even 680ec020, then postponed the a1200 for another 6 months to up the specs and sort the bug in the aga)

It would be nice to have some music compilations with graphics especially for dance tracks - there may well be some in dusty cupboards as some nightclubs in the rave era did use cdtv for this purpose

Personally i love it as you can have all the disk compilations and since the ability to use recordable cd's you can make all your own compilations.

The spinning logo looks cool on my 43" too!

[Weasel Fierce]

Did any of those "multi media" sort-of-console systems do well? CD-I, 3D0, CDTV and so on. It seems the whole idea was basically something there just wasn't a market for.

Sega CD did pretty well, because it was adding to a proven device that had plenty of usability on its own.

[Seiya]

However CDTV is not a total failure becuase Educational and Multimedia software are very good and not so much different from the MPC from same era.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by ScottC2010

I remember it being just too expensive, add to that the incompatibility with a lot of 1mb games and ocs instead of ecs. It was actually cheaper to buy a 500+ and then the A570 drive so most amiga owners (And anyone who read computer mags) waited for that. I bought mine though in 1994 for £150 after i sold my amiga the previous year so that I could buy a Super Famicom. I still use it today now with loads of extra memory and kick 3.1 etc.

I wonder if someone could adapt cinepak V1.2 which is what the mega-cd used (A modified version) to create some of the fmv games like rebel assault and tomcat alley - it should be able to, even if only in 32 colours or ehb.

I think if it had had the full spec of the 500+ and the same expansion card slot and shipped with 2mb chip and maybe a better processor plus some better advertising it might have done better. An MPEG cartridge would have helped too. (They should have shipped the 500/600 with 2MB as well as hd floppy and either a 68010 or even 680ec020, then postponed the a1200 for another 6 months to up the specs and sort the bug in the aga)

It would be nice to have some music compilations with graphics especially for dance tracks - there may well be some in dusty cupboards as some nightclubs in the rave era did use cdtv for this purpose

Personally i love it as you can have all the disk compilations and since the ability to use recordable cd's you can make all your own compilations.

The spinning logo looks cool on my 43" too!

CD-ROM tech was expensive in the early days, like anything you pay a premium when it first comes out.

The A500+ and A570 weren’t any cheaper than the CDTV Multimedia pack late 1992, the former being £750 combined, the latter was reduced to £499 not long after the A570 finally came out.

If you list any more extras it would end up being a CD32

Originally Posted by Weasel Fierce

Did any of those "multi media" sort-of-console systems do well? CD-I, 3D0, CDTV and so on. It seems the whole idea was basically something there just wasn't a market for.

Sega CD did pretty well, because it was adding to a proven device that had plenty of usability on its own.

Pre internet (www) don’t forget there was a market for infotech products, but turns out not for standalone machines, multimedia products ended up just being sold for PC CDROMs rather than those mentioned, with hindsight its easy to see of course, but any market could be worth billions its worth a shot with a product.

Philips pumped $1 billion into the CDi project to get 1 million sales, a cost of $1000 per machine sold!
3D0 was nice but too expensive at launch, by the time the price was right the Saturn and PSX were on the scene.
CDTV found a small niche market, but estimates put sales at a lowly 80-90k

Mega CD (Sega CD) only did quite well in the US, it pretty much flopped anywhere else.

[Weasel Fierce]

Yeah, I don't begrudge any company for giving it a shot and we got some neat tech out of it. A fascinating bit of computer history.

It just ended up being one of those things that nobody was sure about what to do with and with people increasingly having a PC anyway, as you say, CD ROM software made more sense.

I always wondered if the best case outcome for the CDTV wouldn't have been to use it to help push CD ROM as a medium for amigas but maybe not.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by Weasel Fierce

I always wondered if the best case outcome for the CDTV wouldn't have been to use it to help push CD ROM as a medium for amigas but maybe not.

I can partly understand the way round they did it with the mystery and intriguement of CD-ROM being new and a premium product they wanted a standalone product. They would have done better getting more Amiga publisher support by releasing CDROM drives for EVERY Amiga and make sure full compatibility with each other then release a standalone product. Turns out the A570 drive was kepted from retail was because they had to shift all the unsold CDTV units first, how? by bundling them in multimedia bundles and attaching the Amiga brand name back on!


My previous answer regarding the price, i forgot it was 92 and 91, of course the A500+ was discontinued by this point, the A600 was reduced to £299, but of course the £349 A570 was not compatible with it, another masterstroke by Commodore!

[oscar_ates]

I found an interesting article on the CDTV failure:

https://www.filfre.net/2017/10/the-6...of-multimedia/

It sold only 350 with full price and 30k with fire-sales apparently.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by oscar_ates

I found an interesting article on the CDTV failure:

https://www.filfre.net/2017/10/the-6...of-multimedia/

It sold only 350 with full price and 30k with fire-sales apparently.

If you read the article, it states they sold 350 at the ‘computer show’, nothing to do with full price sales elsewhere, which of course they would have achieved some in the first 6-7 months before they started reducing the price.

[oscar_ates]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

If you read the article, it states they sold 350 at the ‘computer show’, nothing to do with full price sales elsewhere, which of course they would have achieved some in the first 6-7 months before they started reducing the price.

I read the article including the comments:


" The final verdict on CDTV is about as ugly as they come: less than 30,000 sold worldwide in some eighteen months of trying; less than 10,000 sold in the American market Commodore so desperately wanted to break back into, and many or most of those sold at fire-sale discounts after the platform’s fate was clear. In other words, the 350 CDTV units that had been sold to the faithful at that first ebullient World of Amiga show made up an alarmingly high percentage of all the CDTV units that would ever sell. (Phillips, by contrast, would eventually manage to move about 1 million CD-I units over the course of about seven years of trying.)"

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by oscar_ates

I read the article including the comments:


" The final verdict on CDTV is about as ugly as they come: less than 30,000 sold worldwide in some eighteen months of trying; less than 10,000 sold in the American market Commodore so desperately wanted to break back into, and many or most of those sold at fire-sale discounts after the platform’s fate was clear. In other words, the 350 CDTV units that had been sold to the faithful at that first ebullient World of Amiga show made up an alarmingly high percentage of all the CDTV units that would ever sell. (Phillips, by contrast, would eventually manage to move about 1 million CD-I units over the course of about seven years of trying.)"

That’s not data, just someone trying to make a joke out of the situation. I forget the exact numbers but it was something like 10-12k sold in the first year, either at £599 or £499 (or equivalent in each country) before being sold off cheaper in late 1992 and 1993.

Better data and evidence can be found here - https://cdtvland.com/2022/02/11/how-...ommodore-make/

[Paul_s]

Having owned one it certainly had the build quality of a 2000 but a grace and beauty all it's own.

I personally don't think the market was ready for it, shame really as it took the best parts of the 500/2000 and expanded on that.

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by Paul_s

Having owned one it certainly had the build quality of a 2000 but a grace and beauty all it's own.

I personally don't think the market was ready for it, shame really as it took the best parts of the 500/2000 and expanded on that.

It should have been based on the same 32 bit tech +CPU as the A3000 then an expanded CDTV would have made a lot of sense ;-) Cost could have been kept lower due to higher volume of same/shared components? If you were unsure how useful a living room device would be you could convert into a high end PC.
I know A3000 was stupid expensive at launch, but I refuse to think it was priced strategically to take market share.

[oscar_ates]

Beta and VHS systems had better resolution and framerate. Also you could save tv programs, videos to cassette. CD based systems had very low fps and no save option. So they were not competitive