Why CDTV failed?

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

... Really?

No it was a joke. I didn’t have an answer to it if that was a serious statement.

Originally Posted by Daedalus

Have you got a link to that press release? Are you talking about the same dollars? There are magazine articles from the time that say it was launched for $799 and reduced to $599 after a year, but an official source for that press release would be helpful. Perhaps some confusion could be down to various different models with different specifications and prices?

Yes of course its US dollars.

https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fort...6882/index.htm

But i feel other peoples estimates are what some retailers were discounting it for not the real RRP and their memories may be hazy and thought it was the retail price.

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=...%24999&f=false

Originally Posted by Daedalus

The good thing about Wikipedia is that you can just go and fix it - if you have evidence to back up your changes, of course. The article you're talking about for the CD-i 450 might simply have been an awkward bit of language - it's easy to write something that can be interpreted in several ways.

Tried it before, but some jackass what just change it to what they thought suited their evidence, alot of pages with people like that.

Originally Posted by Daedalus

Not to the extent to which the CDTV was redesigned - it was effectively a completely new machine.

Well yes, because it was not just to cost reduce the machine but to make up for some errors with the first machine, the main one being able to support FMV, a big oversight at the time and one that most mags picked up on.

Originally Posted by Daedalus

Without the dates on those advertisements it's hard to say whether they do reflect the launch price or not. Perhaps a link to the complete original magazine, rather than your own compilation, would be more suitable.

Well Commodore aimed it at Hi-Fi mags more than Amiga ones, but here is one from AF 10-1991 with a Sep 91 street date, but there was certainly no price drop before then.

https://archive.org/details/Amiga_Fo...ng_GB/page/n36

But anyway i think i have given enough evidence to back up my memories from the time, i would need to see evidence in return to justify the prices Brian Bagnell was coming up with.

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

No it was a joke. I didn’t have an answer to it if that was a serious statement.

That's okay then Hard to tell sometimes.

https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fort...6882/index.htm

That doesn't look to be the press release. And here's another article from the time that lists different prices: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=...page&q&f=false

But i feel other peoples estimates are what some retailers were discounting it for not the real RRP and their memories may be hazy and thought it was the retail price.

Or maybe they're all thinking of different models, since the CD-i was a range of similar devices rather than a single model.

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=...%24999&f=false

The problem with searching like that is that you're just looking for what you think it should be (confirmation bias). For example, in this link, the $999 doesn't refer to a Philips CD-i, but to a Nikkodo CD-G100, which isn't the same thing at all.

Tried it before, but some jackass what just change it to what they thought suited their evidence, alot of pages with people like that.

Yeah, that can happen. But if your evidence is equally valid, then at least it can be changed to reflect both conflicting sources, and if it's repeatedly taken down, it can be raised to higher community members. Nevertheless, the CD-i page on Wikipedia at least has more accurate dates.

Well Commodore aimed it at Hi-Fi mags more than Amiga ones, but here is one from AF 10-1991 with a Sep 91 street date, but there was certainly no price drop before then.

https://archive.org/details/Amiga_Fo...ng_GB/page/n36

Yep, that's better, thanks. I agree it's unlikely that the price was reduced in the half year in between, but not impossible.

But anyway i think i have given enough evidence to back up my memories from the time, i would need to see evidence in return to justify the prices Brian Bagnell was coming up with.

Just to be clear, I never claimed his information was correct. Bagnall usually provides plenty of references in the footnotes, but it's a while since I read the CDTV parts and can't remember if he had one for that specific information. To be fair, his books also have some typographical errors so it's not beyond the realms of possibility that there are other errors in there.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

That doesn't look to be the press release.

Yeah sorry couldn’t find the other link, plus it was a newspaper article that linked to a site you had to pay to read the whole article, the date and price still matched the billboard (sep 92 issue) article i linked to of then being $799 after Aug 92.

Originally Posted by Daedalus

The problem with searching like that is that you're just looking for what you think it should be (confirmation bias). For example, in this link, the $999 doesn't refer to a Philips CD-i, but to a Nikkodo CD-G100, which isn't the same thing at all.

Btw that Billboard link you have to press the previous page button it grabbed the wrong section, here is the correct link.
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=...%24999&f=false


Tbh its not what i think it should be, i remember them having the same price at launch. and i have no bias trying to find the correct price (someone feel free to show evidence of a $799 RRP launch article). Don’t forget the UK CD-i sold for £699 is more evidence that the US version would have similar conversion rates to the CDTV, not nearly pound for pound deal that was unheard of until the 2000s.

[Gorf]

The CDTV would have been great in 1989.
Than it would have gotten more attention und would have been a thing to buy für the CD-Player feature alone.

It would have been still nice in 1990, with some upgrades like a simple 14MHz hack for the CPU and a lower price...

In 1991 it was too late since the CD32 should have been released a year later in 92

Wrong timing, bad marketing, lack of software development, old OS version, external developer team lacking the experience of making cost effective hardware, Medhi Ali, .... what could possibly go wrong?

[Photon]

We can only speculate.

Probably because it was so early that people didn't know they wanted it. Years later they did, and got Multimedia add-ons for their PCs. Even later, consoles got CDs because they had to be cheap.

It was expensive, but not really very expensive for the hardware. The problem I think was that mass consumers associated CDs with only music at the time, and then it was a very expensive CD player.

It was more expensive for the software. Apart from the CD functionality, it had too few titles on release. Although my thought is the majority of consumers had no clue Multimedia was going to be a thing.

It could have been a great console, something that Commodore-Amiga tried only a year later, but they were competing with themselves here - those who would want a CDTV for gaming knew that for the same money you'd get an Amiga 500 with 20 games, joystick, and monitor, and they too didn't see the CD drive as a bonus.

[alexh]

Two reasons that stand out in my mind are :

1) The CDTV was a "special projects"design and thus too expensive. Special projects developed low volume high earning special Amiga based designs for one-off customers, such as Kiosk or Arcade etc. As such it had a very high manufacturing price tag but for their customers it made money. Selling retail it should have been redesigned / cost reduced. The unreleased CDTV-CR would have fixed that and should have been the first product.

2) Lack of software. It just needed a killer game instead of lame Amiga 500 ports with no extra sound or graphics just a higher price. HAD someone written "Guitar Hero" for the CDTV (which it was more than capable of) then it could/would have been a success.

You have to remember that VCD was 3 years away there were no movies on disc only audio and the 3D revolution which came with the PSOne was 6 years away.

[Glen M]

Our school had one in the library it was never used. The problem with it along with the cdi was that both products were made for a market that didn't exist. No one wanted half an encyclopedia on a cd that had to read from there TV, no one wanted a cd player hanging off their TV etc.

Its a cool looking piece of kit and I'd love to add one to the collection but it'd have to be upgraded to make it a useful machine. Needs more ram as a minimum.

[Nobby_UK]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

Anyone tried burning some videos/movies and playing it on CDTV?
I see that CDTV had some special video format (CDXL), and I am wondering how it compares to ham 6 (quality vs size).

There was some Anime (High School of the Dead etc...)
converted to CDXL for the CD32 ---

I doubt they would work on the CDTV though.

[rare_j]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

Yeah i remember wanting a Playstation in 1992

The point is nobody wanted any of these crappy cd add-on systems until it turned up in 1995!

[DrBong]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

Why CDTV failed?

I don't get it.

It offers so much new and cool stuff, back in the day.
Apart from listening CD music, you could do ton's of other stuff + add a keyboard, mouse, and a floppy, and you got A500 with thousands of games library.

I think "The Truth About the CDTV" summarises the failure of the CDTV quite nicely, at least in the UK market:

THE LAUNCH
CDTV was first announced at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Chicago in Summer 1990 and was clearly designed to take advantage of the long delay in launching CD-i, which had been announced in 1986 and was still a long way off.

In Chicago, Commodore talked of a CDTV launch by Christmas 1990, but this proved hopelessly optimistic - good multimedia software is difficult to produce. The new launch date for CDTV in Europe and America was moved to March '91, but was finally unveiled at the end of April 1991.

The first players cost around £599 with software priced around £17-30. There were 25 titles available at the launch with a further 75 promised for Christmas.

However, the launch revealed the problems in getting CDTV software to the market because the free CDTV sampler discs weren't ready. CDTV purchasers were given vouchers, which could be exchanged when the software was available!

Commodore admits that it screwed up on the CDTV campaign and only now can the debacle be revealed. At the launch, Commodore stated that the CDTV would be available in 125 Dixons stores from day one (April/May '91) and in 2,500 retail outlets by the Autumn (Sept '91). Around 80,000 CDTV players were expected to be sold in the first year in the UK.

Every company hypes up its new products, but the Commodore figures proved to be mega-hype.

Suspicions about CDTV's sales grew when people found it hard to track down the players (a bit like the software now, eh?). Cynics quipped that Philips ought to launch a CD-i game called 'Where is CDTV?'

Commodore revealed that by early October '91 players were available in just four Dixons stores in central London, although the company claimed that they could be found in thousands of computer stores. 'The poor take up wasn't due to Dixons' efforts,' said a Commodore spokesman. 'We just didn't realise how difficult it was to sell multimedia to the consumer market.' Commodore also says that just 6,000 players had been shipped to dealers.

CDTV PLANS
Yet there were other problems. The first CDTV adverts were obscure and video & hi-fi magazines, who had been writing about the format for months, couldn't get hold of CDTV players for review.

Journalists were promised CDTV players for evaluation, but these never materialised. Computer magazines, however, were reviewing the format and some were even offering machines as prizes!

'It wasn't our policy to ignore the consumer maqazines,' insisted a Commodore spokesman. 'In fact, some of the prizes had been bought by the computer magazines themselves.'

To add to Commodore's woes, there wasn't even a CDTV in-store demonstration disc ready at the launch.

Commodore attempted to boost CDTV sales by launching several accessories including a keyboard, trackball and infrared mouse after finally backing down and admitting that it was a computer.

An Advanced Video Mode (AVM) card was promised for Spring 1992 (Mar-May '92), which it claimed would narrow the picture quality gap between CD-i and CDTV and give it four million colours, as opposed to its existing 4,096. Commodore claimed that it would cost £50, but it is still yet to appear.

Commodore also claims that the AVM card will enable CDTV to play Photo CD discs. Photo CD is a format jointly developed by Philips and Kodak, which enables users to have camera films developed onto a compact disc for manipulation and viewing on TV.

ANGRY RESPONSE
In June 1991 Commodore announced that CDTV would be compatible with Photo CD. The statement brought an angry response from Kodak and Philips who denied this, adding that the formats specifications were still not finalised.

Not surprisingly, Commodore was a little cagey about AVM and Photo CD. 'As far as I'm aware the Photo CD licence is concerned with how the images are manipulated on the screen and not whether they can be displayed,' said a spokesman.

'AVM would enable existing CDTV decks to display Photo CD pictures, but not alter them. However, I'm talking about the existing Photo CD standard. Philips and Kodak could be churlish and change the standard, so that this is no longer possible.'

The standard has now been set for Photo CD and it is on sale now. When will AVM eventually appear and will it make Photo CD work on CDTV? We'll just have to wait and see.

But what about full motion video (FMV)? In early 1991 Commodore produced CDXL, a software system that enables CDTV to play motion video (around 12 frames a second, or half the rate required for FMV) in a quarter of the screen. It has already been included in numerous titles including 'NASA - Heroic Age of Space Flight'.

Commodore says that CDXL combined with AVM could up this rate to around 15 frames per second. Even so, this still isn't FMV! At present the world standard for digital FMV has been decided, but it's going to be a while before FMV chips are included in machines.

***Compiled by Julian T. Lavanini [CDTV Users Club (UK)], January 1993

[DrBong]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

Why CDTV failed?

I don't get it.

It offers so much new and cool stuff, back in the day.
Apart from listening CD music, you could do ton's of other stuff + add a keyboard, mouse, and a floppy, and you got A500 with thousands of games library.

A few interesting (if not curious) insights into the failure of the CD-i and its competitors - including the CDTV - in the U.S. market are revealed in this excerpt from a paper entitled "Problems of Diffusion in High Technology: Compact Disc-Interactive (CD-I)--A Case Study", which was presented at an American broadcast conference in April 1993:

CD-I AND ITS COMPETITORS (CURRENT AND POTENTIAL)
The Philips CD-I player CD1910 was launched in the US in October 1991 with a list price of $1,000, although a discounted market price of around $800 was predicted. [see FOOTNOTE below]

It followed the launch earlier in 1991 of CDTV (Commodore Dynamic Total Vision) by Amigavision for which sales figures are not yet available but are believed to be very low. More importantly, CD-I is some years behind Interactive Video Disc (IVD) and Digital Video Interactive (DVI) which combine a laser disc with CD-ROM storage and are marketed mainly by IBM.

The principle drawbacks of both the IBM and Amigavision competing systems are that they utilize a separate computer drive and they don't hook up to a normal TV monitor. Consequently, they are more cumbersome and they are much more expensive. The IBM "Knowledge" system, for example, is priced around $10,000 and includes the Ultimedia M57 SLC computer with 6 M-bytes of RAM and an 80-M-byte hard disc and an internal CD-ROM M-Motion Adapter/a capture and play-back card, a Matrox Illuminator-16 video card and a Pioneer LD-V8000 LaserDisc player.

A more serious competitor for CD-I is the 1992 announcement by Apple Macintosh that its next generation of computers (perhaps only a year away) will have built-in CD drives and these will be incompatible with CD-I discs (although Philips maintain Apple has now decided they will be compatible). Apple and IBM have also linked in a joint venture called Kaleida to develop a new operating system and this is being viewed as a precurser to further joint productive efforts which could further damage CD-I's credibility and competitive edge.

FOOTNOTE
In the event, the price of a CD-I player fell further with Radio Shack in May, 1992 offering Philips-manufactured players under its Memorex own-brand name for $499.95. The Memorex price does not include any software (whereas the Philips' sets are "bundled" with two free tapes worth approximately $50.

Otherwise, the players are identical and Philips' consumer service department confirmed in a phone call on June 4, 1992 that the "FMV extension will plug into both sets when it's available this Fall or early next year". As previously stated, this latter promise has been revised to a delayed implementation of FMV modules on a limited scale "by the end of this year" (1992) "...(although) the cartridges...priced at approximately $200 are not expected to sell in large quantities until the latter part of 1993." At the CD-I two conference in October, 1992, Philips was suggesting a list price for players of $599 including "bundling" an enhanced version of the CD-ROM Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia on CD-I.

[Retro1234]

CD-I might have been a commercial failure but it had a better library than the CDTV and for a while every Tech Store you went in had one on display and was an object of Curiosity.

iirc Tomorrows World did a peace on the CD-I and a small mention of the CDTV

its hard to see where the CDTV would fit in? where was it aimed at? it had a CD drive but was under powered.

[Retro1234]

and what happened to Planetside

[th4t1guy]

Well, if eBay buy-it-now auctions are anything to go by, it looks like the CDTV is back to launch price.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Retro1234

CD-I might have been a commercial failure but it had a better library than the CDTV and for a while every Tech Store you went in had one on display and was an object of Curiosity.

iirc Tomorrows World did a peace on the CD-I and a small mention of the CDTV

its hard to see where the CDTV would fit in? where was it aimed at? it had a CD drive but was under powered.

Phillips did sell much more units (over a million), so there was a bigger market for software titles.
But Philipps never made any profit from it. They claimed a total loss of over a billion $ for this project ...

So Commodore could simply not afford to sell as many units

[ScottC2010]

I still use my CDTV regularly as well as my 1200 and absolutley love it - you can add a switch to turn off the CD for more compatibility - the screen boots to a 1.3 logo too.
I remember i got the 'truth about CDTV' when i ordered some disks years ago - insight dinosaurs and the pysgnosis demo' - AVM sounded quite cool at the time.
Also added a PS/2 to keyboard and have a nice acer keyboard as well as the original mouse and floppy. It does also have the PCMCIA but version 1 - there should be adapters out there. Also added the adapter to for standard joystick ports.
You can make video (CDXL) 1/4 screen 10-12 frames/sec from anim5 and sound 8svx i think. (I had a go with hv http://majsta.com/modules.php?name=N...=article&sid=9 but this is more for amiga with hard disk drive)
I am really enjoying the amigajay disks - absolutely brilliant

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by Retro1234

and what happened to Planetside

Never progressed to anything other than an animation, but I remember seeing it on display and drooling over it.

[d4rk3lf]

Many great replies, and great information's, thanks people.

My conclusion (in short) is this:
It was way ahead of it's time (and that is not issue, but opportunity ), but C=, as always, didn't knew possibilities of it's own devices, therefore did a terrible marketing, and price was a little bit to high. No mind blowing software was released, and they were totally unable to convince families, that they need system like that.
---------------------------

Now, while reading all this, and doing a little bit of research on my own, I am really curios about CDXL format, and what is possible to actually play on CDTV straight from CD.
I mean.. I am tempted to see best quality/res/fps ratio for this device, and still haven't find time to try some converting.
From what I understood, something like 35 minute of video is possible with pretty low res, 10-15 fps... but hey.. that's amazing for it's time!

I'll try 1-2 minutes, and will test in on my real A500 with Aca500+ (will make it 7Mhz), and if I succeed, I will try Winuae A500 with 300kb per second transfer (if possible), so I emulate CD speed...
And if works.. and results are satisfying... then.. we can do whatever we want: Episodes of: Only Fulls and Horses, Blackadder, Simpsons, or some nature documentary, or 1/3 of some movie.
The goal is that we establish some fast workflow in converting whatever we want, then we can very easily increase CDTV (video) library.
So, anyone with a CDTV could download some video, burn it, and watch it.

Any recommendations for converters are most welcome, and if possible, all converting to be done on PC (for the sake of speed).

[Retro1234]

If Mad Dog McCree was possible or something like that would of made a difference

Its like later Street Fighter 2 was needed then later Doom was needed etc....

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

Now, while reading all this, and doing a little bit of research on my own, I am really curios about CDXL format, and what is possible to actually play on CDTV straight from CD.
I mean.. I am tempted to see best quality/res/fps ratio for this device, and still haven't find time to try some converting.
From what I understood, something like 35 minute of video is possible with pretty low res, 10-15 fps... but hey.. that's amazing for it's time!

I'll try 1-2 minutes, and will test in on my real A500 with Aca500+ (will make it 7Mhz), and if I succeed, I will try Winuae A500 with 300kb per second transfer (if possible), so I emulate CD speed...
And if works.. and results are satisfying... then.. we can do whatever we want: Episodes of: Only Fulls and Horses, Blackadder, Simpsons, or some nature documentary, or 1/3 of some movie.
The goal is that we establish some fast workflow in converting whatever we want, then we can very easily increase CDTV (video) library.
So, anyone with a CDTV could download some video, burn it, and watch it.

Any recommendations for converters are most welcome, and if possible, all converting to be done on PC (for the sake of speed).

I don’t think in this day and age it would be very comfortable or enjoyable watching a episode of something in CDXL, some are bearable on the CD32 with the faster transfer rate and screen size, on CDTV its less 1/4 screen size and lower fps, unique and stunning for the time of course, not really usable for TV or Films.

Btw the CDTV Nasa disc has got 50mins of CDXL at 10fps in under 500mb for reference.