Faced with a scathing piece in Friday’s Wall Street Journal giving an account of how, allegedly through arrogance and inability to understand the market, the company failed to sell more than 200,000 of its Compact Disk-interactive players in the US in five years of marketing, a smarting Philips Electronics NV responded by saying that it was set to integrate the CD-i player with a soon-to-be-launched Digital Video Disk system. With the move, expected when the super-high-capacity optical disk is introduced at the end of the year or early next, Philips would effectively end marketing CD-i players, which are estimated to have cost – and to all intents and purposes lost – the Dutch company over $1,000m. DVD is quicker and gives better image quality but is basically a similar product. Everything played on CD-i can be run on DVD, Philips told Reuter. We are still studying the timing and the type of product we want to launch. Owners of CD-i players would be able to play the ir collection of CD-i disks – of which there was never a wide enough variety – on DVD players, it said. Marketing of CD-i players will continue in Europe until the Digital Video Disk version arrives, it said.
