The History of the Philips CD-I, Failed PlayStation Ancestor
I was one of the lead developers at Philips Interactive Media. To be fair, where the article focuses on video games, the CD-I player was never intended to be a game machine. At the time, Philips was betting that encyclopedias, educational and subscription publications would be on discs. They were betting that the network speed and general public adoption of the Internet was going to be slower, with a disc based interactive media period. They underestimated the advance of network speeds as well as the public&#x27;s willingness to wait for the network. A lot of the CD-I development was centered around the consumer &#x2F; end-user never having to wait, which was accomplished through a special real time media file format that effectively turned the disc into a single 740 MB file.<p>It was not until the reality of CD-I players being sold that the necessity for games and the zero interest in educational media became clear. At the time, digital media itself was new, and the idea of a dedicated digital disc based encyclopedia &#x2F; magazine made sense.