CompuServe Messages

Hi Chuck and anyone elsein AmigaLand, In a dutch computer newspaper was an article on multimedia, interactive TV & CD-rom. There's an interesting alinea in it about Philips and Samsung. Here's my translation of it " A building along Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles, not far from where the moviestars live in Beverly Hills. This is residence of Pkilips Interactive Media of America (Pima), ………. But they work hard here. Sitting behind COMMODORE AMIGA'S, Unix-workstations and ordinary PC's ten's of programmer's, drawing artist …. new titels for interactive compact disc's en since recently also movies. ……… Despite recent publicity on the "electronic highway" Philips sees CD-I as a very good Multimedia-system. De player is easy to use which can be connected directly to the TV. The system has not the connectivity/configuration-problems of CD-Rom-player for PC's. Added to that, a CD-i_machine can easily be adapted for interactive program's. The adaption is not much more than developing a programm and putting it into a memory-chip for the multitasking-system OS/9. Philips has a model without the CD-part that can be used as plug-in-box for interactive TV. The machine has been ordered by Bell Atlantic for a try-out-project. ……… The technology for CD-Interactive has been developed some years ago with the help of Sony and Matsushita and has been accepted as "world-standard", but since then Philips has been on it's own. Most Japanese companies have no real faith in it. Still Philips is not totally left alone. Some big Korean companies, SAMSUNG and Daewoo, will bring interactieve CD-players to the market soon. " Well, the question is, did Philips and Samsung buy our Amiga to use the technology to make the CD-interactive finally succesfull, or did they buy it to finish it? I like to believe that the last option is out of the question, but i'm not sure. As the CD32 was doing very well, and is a full competitor on CD-Audio,CD-Video and Photo-CD, why not get it out of the way. Why Samsung bought the Amiga? Won't be to get it out of the way? Was it to help Philips? Did they make some kind of deal? As described in the article above indicates, they're supporting the same platform. What could be, let's hope so, is that the OS/9 is not good enough, so they've decided to use the Amiga-OS/CD32 for the next version of their CD-I players. Why not, just add some software to run the old CD-games and of we go. Let's cross fingers. This could be the total end of Amiga, or the start of a great carreer. Hans Keesom Amsterdam