The viewer is also shown the various questions that were asked. With a click of the mouse, the viewer picks the questions, and each source comes to life briefly, answering in video. Yet it also differs from television and film in the depth and variety of information available, and in the way it lets viewers interact with the entire package. MacIntosh versions aren't yet available, but NWI hopes they will be next year. For this reason, people tend to think multimedia material won't be worth looking at for some time to come.
Journalists have extra reason to shake their heads.
No matter how good CDs get, their manufacture and distribution is time-consuming, rendering them impractical for live news. What the news business really needs is the full data highway, where multimedia material will be delivered live over the phone wires, TV cables, satellite air waves, or through some combination thereof. But Rogers and others believe that even when that day arrives, the people setting the standards in this new industry will be the CD pioneers. Currently, NWI estimates that about 4 million people own CD-ROM players, a figure Church expects to more than double by 1995. So far, these people have very little nonfiction material to play with, which makes NWI hope for a market.