Super Video CD Technology. High-Quality Video CD (HQ-VCD), developed by the Video CD Consortium (consisting of Philips, Sony, Matsushita and JVC — creators of the original Video CD specification) was a relatively late entry. The Chinese Ministry of Information and the Video CD Consortium agreed to join forces, incorporating the features of HQ-VCD under a unified SVCD format. But by the time the SVCD specification was ready in July 1998, CVD had already been adopted by major manufacturers and had quickly established a significant installed base of about 600,000 players. This prompted the Chinese government to force a compromise between the competing standards
Philips CD-i that though Philips had a large booth at the 1995 Electronic Entertainment Expo, there was no CD-i hardware or software on display. "Next Generation" scored the console one out of five stars. After its discontinuation, retrospectively, the CD-i was overwhelmingly panned by critics who blasted its graphics, games, and controls. Microsoft CEO Bill Gates admitted that initially he "was worried" about the CD-i due to Philips's heavy support for the device and its two-pronged attack on both the games console and PC markets, but that in retrospect "It was a device that kind of basically got caught in the middle.