Nice memories by Renate van Stigt on Twitter. Renate was working as a franchise owner of a Videoland store/branch (a video rental chain in The Netherlands). In The Netherlands, Videoland was a place where you could rent CD-i titles, next to the wide catalogue of VHS tapes. CD-i was the first step in digitization of the content on compact disc. Thinking back of the Philips CD-i brought back some specific details. Renate: "I was working as a branch manager of a Videoland next to my study. When CD-i was introduced, we normally rented 10 tapes of popular movies and rented 20 extra pieces for the first three months after every release.
That was long ago, on VHS, beta-max, video 2000
formats. We also had Sega and Nintendo games for rent. Back then in
1993, Videoland was taken over by Philips and they heavily promoted CD-i
with Tatjana Simic. Without asking they sent lots of CD-i players to
every Videoland branch including the CD-i 'Secrets of Tatjana',
including invoices! During the launch period, we only had two CD-i for
rent: Tatjana's Secrets and something about counting for children.
Normally we had a promotion about 'rent 3 pieces for 3 days, but for
CD-i we had to adapt this. In fact, we
didn't want these players in our stores because there were just two
CD-i's available for us. All Videoland employees were invited to join a
Philips CD-i launch party starring Tatjana Simic and without asking 8
CD-i players were sent to us, including Secrets of Tatjana, including
the invoice. Well, Tatjana did very well, we rented a lot of her. 1991
;-) "
[Thanks: Renate van Stigt]