Re: Who'll Put the "I" in the CD-I?: Interactive Optical Disks
The OnLine CD-I Conference was one of several CD-I conferences being held in the wake of Microsoft's 2nd Annual CD-ROM Conference, where GE/RCA supposedly dealt the fledgling CD-I industry the "death blow" with its new video encoding scheme, DVI.
The conference consisted of three days of concurrent meetings and presentations and one day of special interest group workshops. The attendees included a broader spectrum of occupations/industries than the CD-ROM Conference. There were musicians; magazine publishers; engineers, producers and executives from the recording, television and motion picture industries; consumer electronics marketeers and even a jingle writer.
Compact Disc-Interactive. CD-I is not a disc, not a disk drive and not a disc format. CD-I is a developing specification for a self-contained computer, software and optical disc system. A CD-I system is based on a 680x0 CPU with audio, video and graphics co processors; CD-RTOS (a realtime operating system based on OS9); lots of firmware; large RAM buffers and an advanced CD-V player (described below). It can be a standalone consumer appliance (attached to any TV) or it can be a modular, full-fledged PC system with optional keyboard, mouse, disk drives, printer, etc.
Some of the maximum specifications of the proposed CD-I system standard are:
• Audio - up to 16 channels of music, sound or speech at four quality levels: 1.2 hours at CD quality level, 2.2 hrs. at LP quality, 4.8 hrs. at "FM-stereo," or up to 20 hrs. at "AM-mono" level. The format is fully compatible with CD-A (all audio CDs will play in any CD-I player)
• Video - output to NTSC, PAL and SECAM world broadcast standards, capable of full-screen stills or half-screen sequences (motion video at 12-15 frames per second is currently limited to a quarter-screen). Up to 6000 video still pictures, variable length CLUT (Color Look Up Table) animation, or RGB output.
• Graphics resolution - 384 x 280 or 768 x 560, with 30,000 displayable colors out of a 16 million color palette
• Text - ASCII format, up to 300,000 pages
• Copy Protection - none, but not copyable due to enormous amount of data, interleaving of data types, interactivity and multiple media
CD-I is unique in that it also features simultaneous playback and customization capabilities. Due to the realtime operating system, interleaved data and over a megabyte of RAM buffers, audio, video, graphics and/or text data blocks can be read in, stored, playedback, manipulated and synchronized in any combination. Text from one part of the disc and a video still image from another sector can be read in and buffered, then played back with a separate audio track simultaneously. Therefore, based on dynamic user inputs or a random generator, the static read-only data on a CD-I disc doesn't have to play back the same way every time.
CD-I vs. CD-ROM. These are two very similar technologies based on the most successful consumer electronics medium ever introduced, the digital audio compact disc (CD). The difference between the two is not in their names—both are interactive, both are read only. It is not really in their capacities or their audio/video capabilities either. The difference is in scope, target audience, level of support, developer requirements, program/data portability, distribution channels and potential volume.
• Scope and Target Audience - CD-ROM is an existing optical disk format (not a system standard) that is aimed initially, but not exclusively, at the library, busi ness and technical markets. CD-I is a self-contained computer, software and optical disc system aimed initially, but not exclusively, at the consumer and K-12 markets.
• Level and type of Industry Support - CD-ROM is supported by hundreds of personal computer firms and publishers. CD-I is being supported by hundreds of firms in the consumer electronics and the entertainment industry.
• Developer requirements - CD-ROM development can be done by any competent PC software programmer. CD-I development is extremely expensive and requires expertise from the audio, video, entertainment, advertising, publishing and computer industries. This is probably its single greatest stumbling block.
• Program and data portability - CD-ROMs hold only data—retrieval software is shipped on floppy disks. Thus, the data can be (but isn't always) fully portable and programming is host-specific. In CD-I, both the retrieval program and the data is present on the disk and both are compatible only with a CD-I system.
• Distribution channels and potential volume - In the past two years, a few thousand CD-ROM disks have been sold direct in single copies. Two years from now, CD-I disks will might be sold in retail outlets ranging from computer stores to record & video stores in volumes perhaps as high as a few thousand per month.
• Industry infrastructure - CD-ROM is a product of the computer and reference publishing industries. CD-I is a marriage of Japan, Inc., Hollywood, Madison Avenue, Fleet Street and Silicon Valley.
The biggest difference is that a CD-ROM drive is a personal computer mass storage peripheral and a CD-ROM disk is a low cost data publishing medium. However, a CD-I player with a CD-I disk is a PC-based television enhancement device. There is very little you can do on a CD-ROM that can't be done on a very large magnetic disk. The power is in the PC, not the disk per se. CD-I, however, adds precisely that PC power and the CD-ROM capability to a previously dumb television. The result is a new medium—intelligent, computerized interactive television. To understand this better, let's look at the interim product designed to be CD-I's platform, CD-V.
Compact Disc-Video (CD-V) - Philips and PolyGram played a demo tape of CD-V which was later officially introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show by a consortium of 40 firms. In a nutshell, the new product puts five minutes of analog video (with digital soundtrack) and 20 minutes of digital audio on a standard gold-colored 120 cm CD.
The software requires new players. One prototype plays both CD-V and CD-A and is self-contained with a small, flip-up TV screen; another has separate video connectors to any TV/Monitor and a third type, the "Combi-player" plays CD-A, CD-V, and 8- and 12-inch LaserVision™ video disks. Combi-players will be available in two months, the other players are promised before Christmas. Prices of disks range from $7.50 to $25.00 and CD-V players range from $300 to $800. These prices are quite low for a new technology.
Philips' bid is strongly supported by CBS, Hitachi, JVC, Matsushita, Pioneer, PolyGram, Sony, TEAC and Yamaha with many others waiting in the wings. Over 250 new music and video titles on gold CD-Vs will be available shortly. Due to its extensive library of over 2000 music and movie LaserVision disks, Pioneer will be the major beneficiary if CD-V and combi-players are successful. However, its corporate pride is wounded by Philips' move to subsume all of LaserVision under the CD-V name.
CD-V supporters hope that the new medium will be as successful as CD-Audio. It certain ly has a major headstart by piggybacking onto CD technology and its 12,000 music soft ware titles. Another key point is that future uses are allegedly built-in in the form of "CD-I ready" digital I/O ports. (Whether or not these ports will really be useable for CD-I when the standards have yet to be fully agreed upon is obviously open to question.) Philips' plan is to subsidize and quickly build the CD-V market during the next eighteen months and use it as a launching pad for CD-I in late-'88. CD-V is seen as the combination of the earlier optical disk formats, CD-Audio and LaserVision, as well as the bridge to CD-I and future formats.
