Recently we saw some unique scans of Bell Atlantic's Info-Active digital phone directories and Yellow Pages in Washington DC, USA. The title was produced together with CapDisc, who we know of various CD-i conversions including Mad Dog McCree and Kingdom: The Far Reaches. But also in the professional field they were very active with CD-i. Bell Atlantic initiated at least two CD-i projects in Washington DC. CD-i member Jefferson Ogata worked at CapDisc and shares some memories: "This was one of two titles for Bell Atlantic i worked on at Capitol Disc Interactive. The other was InfoTravel, which ran on emulators connected to hotel TV systems in some Marriott and Hilton hotels in Washington, D.C. and Chicago.
InfoTravel
hooked into the TV system of the hotel; if i recall correctly, when
people selected a certain channel that system would deliver button press
events from the TV remote to the application and it would present
advertising for local restaurants. It had a connection also, via some
kind of modem, i think, to the hotel PBX, so if a guest wanted to make a
reservation at a restaurant featured in the presentation, the
application could dial the restaurant and the guest's room and connect
the call. Ran across a demo disc and will post photos of the packaging
text. The
installed version ran on CD-i emulator cards inside a Microsoft Windows
PC. We would install several of these PCs in each hotel, and the hotel
TV system was capable of arbitration to select an available device when a
hotel guest wanted to use the system.
Regarding
the idea of digital phonebooks, i suppose at that time there weren't
really any alternatives; most connectivity to what there was of an
Internet was via dial-up, which would tie up the phone line that you
would wish to use to make a call, so i suppose someone thought it would
be a good idea, and would be cheaper to produce and distribute than the
paper white pages.
Regarding
InfoTravel, i suppose we were actually Philips Media Professional
(pmpro) by the time that title came along; i can't recall whether
CapDisc still existed by then.
CD-i member Seventyy Seven made a video of the ROM provided by Jefferson:
Thanks to the Preserve CD-i Blog for giving the attention to this title. Original credits by Jefferson Ogata, thanks for sharing this on Interactive Dreams! Now also the scans on Archive.org.
[Thanks, Jefferson Ogata. Screenshots and video provided by Seventyy Seven]