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 best software required the MPEG upgrade card. By mid-1996 the U.S. market for CD-i software had dried up and Philips had given up on releasing titles there, but continued to publish CD-i games in Europe, where the console still held some popularity. With the home market exhausted, Philips tried with some success to position the technology as a solution for kiosk applications and industrial multimedia. In addition to consumer models, professional and development players were sold by Philips Interactive Media Systems and their VARs. Philips marketed several CD-i player models. There also exist a number of hard-to-categorize models, such as