If you think Philips put the CD-i standard on the market purely to serve gaming, you're wrong. CD-i was a lot more than that. It was in fact the first commercially released set top box that used CD media. More than that, CD-i made it possible to think out of the box when developing interactive projects: With CD-i developers were able to add an extra layer of interactivity to media projection that was used in business, theaters, cinemas, hospitals and even onstage during live performances of music bands. MusicWorks was one of the companies who experimented with this. Philip van Allen was leading the MusicWorks group at Philips Media that developed
CD-i Ready Hybrid Music CD's.
Philip:
"I led the MusicWorks group at Philips Interactive Media, where I was a Senior Producer developing titles for the Compact Disc Interactive (CD-i) set-top box multimedia platform. As part of our interest in making music titles, we collaborated with the Compact Disc standards group at Philips (the inventors of the CD along with Sony) to invent the first “hybrid” CD format, which included multimedia content on a standard music CD. This format was called CD-i Ready, because the biographies, discographies, videos, games, etc. were in the CD-i format We designed and produced titles in the CD-i format on Mozart, Luciano Pavarotti, and James Brown."
Philip continues: "For the U2
ZooTV tour in 1993, I and my MusicWorks team at Philips Media (
Brett Spivey, Randy Picolet,
Mike Diehr) created two interactive projects for the band to use onstage. It’s fun to think about what it was like to make interactive media back then. Keep in mind, this was the year NCSA released the first real web browser called Mosaic, before Photoshop had layers, and when a 650 meg (not gig!) SCSI hard drive was $2500 and the size of a breadbox.
This experiment allowed the band members to interact with the big video screens as they stood on stage. In the first project, Welcome to ZooTV, Bono selected a region, then the city, and then one of four versions of himself to welcome the audience to the show. The second project was BeatBox, and was run by Edge. He picked a song, and then played around with the beat by changing tempo and selecting between 3 different sound sets (including a zoo version with animal sounds for the kick drum, snare etc.).
These projects were created using
CD-i technology developed by Philips and Sony. This was the first commercially released set top box that used CD media. My MusicWorks group produced several music titles for this medium. These were called
CDi-Ready discs, and they played on normal CD players, but were the first music CDs ever to include multimedia content as well. Titles included James Brown, Mozart, Louis Armstrong, and Luciano Pavarotti.
Apparently the band only used the projects on a couple gigs, as it turned out to be a bit too time-consuming for them to run it in the middle of the set. If anyone has any stage pictures of them using it, please let me know. I think one of the shows where they used it was in Texas.
Later, when I started Commotion, we developed a proposal to create an interactive project with U2, and nearly made a deal. It would have been developed on CDi as well.
