be on board. By Chris Gibbons.

For Rick Morbey, it is like being in at the start of the movie industry. The CDI (Compact Disc Interactive) technology which Morbey, through his one-man company Five Rings, has helped develop over the past six years is about to revolutionise the home entertainment industry and Morbey believes it is a business opportunity that Bermuda cannot afford to miss.

Philips alone say the CDI industry is worth $1.8 billion a year to them at present. By 1997, some analysts believe sales of CDI equipment and software will be worth more than $14 billion.

Morbey is on the cutting edge in developing software for the new system that looks like a regular compact disc but, through a regular TV, plays discs that also include video and still images, text and graphics as well as sound.

Five Rings Ltd. is one of about only 150 multimedia production studios worldwide that develop the software tools - known as authoring tools - to produce those images, text and graphics. Morbey explains: "It's much the same as if you wanted to do word processing. You can't use it without a word processing program.'' But while Morbey has the know-how, he doesn't yet have the staff or capacity to produce material fast enough for a growing global market. "We've had numerous calls from publishing companies looking for the capacity but one person can't do it. It's like saying you know how to build a car but without a factory, you can't do it.'' It's a classic Catch-22 situation. Without investment in more powerful machinery, Morbey won't be able to ride the wave of an exploding market, but investors are hesitant about putting their money into technology they know little about.

Morbey envisages Five Rings, currently little more than a hi-tech closet in Reid Street's Commerce Building, as a digital production studio employing up to 20 people producing top quality material. At present he is one man surrounded by an impressive bank of gadgetry including a Macintosh computer networked to a Philips CD-I workstation that combines text, graphics, animation, sound and video.

"The potential for Bermuda is enormous,'' says Morbey, whose company installed two Philips demonstration players and Sony monitors in the Aquarium's Discovery Room last November. "We have a small facility in place right now that can produce everything necessary for a CDI disc up to a master tape. Once that tape is finished and has a disc image on it, that's all that's needed to be sent to a pressing plant in Taiwan or wherever to produce discs for the whole market.

"One of the advantages of digital technology is that eventually we will be able to transmit that information directly to the plant, although at the moment it's very expensive. The key issue is that geography no longer matters.

This can be produced anywhere in the world. All that is required is the knowledge to do so. In Bermuda we have the opportunity to make a one-jump step to a global market.'' Morbey, who first became interested in CDI in March, 1986 when Philips and Sony first announced they were going to develop it, has spent most of the last six years accumulating that knowledge, working closely with Philips and Sony engineers. "Fifty percent of my time is spent on data networks around the world.'' Even little more than a year ago, Morbey's ideas seemed far-fetched to the unititiated. Now, CDI players are in Bermuda's shops and homes. The next step, says Morbey, is to make Bermudian investors aware of CDI's potential. "I don't think people realise how big the consumer electronics market really is,'' he says, pointing out that two of the top-selling video games, Sonic Hedgehog and Super Mario Brothers, have each earned hundreds of millions of dollars.

"Interest (in CDI) is growing in Bermuda but all too slowly. In the rest of the world millions have been put into studios to do this work but in Bermuda, people are still looking at you and saying `How is this possible?' Not only is it possible but we have the talent in Bermuda to do this work. It also offers quite significant potential for foreign currency earnings.

"It's an industry with very low impact and really doesn't require a vast amount of investment to get going. But for whatever reason, Bermuda seems to be reluctant to invest in an industry they don't know very much about.'' Morbey is trying to raise $500,000 which he says would allow him to hire some staff and "get things rolling''. He cites the example of a Washington, D.C.

studio that raised $7 million in public shares for CD-I development. "It's an example of how in other countries this knowledge is held in very high regard, the business community understands it and is willing to invest in it.'' Morbey believes passionately that he is in the right place at the right time.

"We're at the ground floor of a new media. What we're going to see in interactive media, education and training is going to be a very new experience. It's something that hasn't existed before. People are still figuring out what to do with it. It's a very exciting time to talk to people around the world and develop new codes for this and that. It's still a very small community.'' But not for long. Full Motion Video (FMV) will be a standard feature of CDI players next year and Morbey sees CDI taking over from videotape as the consumers choice of visual entertainment in the same way that audio CD dispensed with vinyl records.

"A raw video shell costs $2.50 per tape to produce, without anything on it. A CDI disc, with the content already on it, costs less than a dollar. When you talk about a system that can give you that decrease in costs, it's inevitable that everyone is going to migrate to this system.'' With CDI movies, viewers will be able to select different shots, angles or storylines, and Morbey says, "I fully expect in years to come to see budgets for CDI titles the same as for feature films. Once the popularity of the system takes hold, you're going to see purpose-built and scripted titles every bit as complex as feature films.'' Currently, the budget for a basic still picture presentation with voice over is about $25,000 while full blown productions with animation and video can cost upwards of $500,000.

There will, he says, still be a place for CD-ROM, the computer-based CD system "as long as Macs and PCs survive'' but adds, "only a small portion of theworld's population - possibly only three per cent - is using PCs. There are a billion and a half TVs in the world. That's the market for CDI.

"We're trying to put the power of a computer in the average person's hand but in a format that isn't frightening to them. As microcircuits become smaller, CDI capability will be built into all sorts of things. The idea is to make digital technology an appliance, and make the computer disappear.'' Morbey believes CDI technology could open international markets to many local productions, from videos to books, as well as being used as a sales or training tool for companies or as a means of making valuable historical or archival material more accessible. One-off exhibitions, for example, could be transferred to CDI and thus turned into a permanent interactive display.

The Aquarium is considering compiling CDIs of local animal life. C omplete with slides and text, it would enable students and scientists to take a tour of Bermuda's Coral Reef or study Bermuda's invertebrates - material that could also be marketed to tourists.

"What we're seeing now is all the media merging into one digital soup,'' says Morbey. "If you have a person sitting at a computer writing a story, it's already in digital form. It only takes a few adjustments to decide whether it's going to be printed in book form or put on a disc or on TV, when that technology arrives.

"It also represents a remarkable opportunity for profits. One story can easily be used in so many different ways.'' AUGUST 1993 RG MAGAZINE