CompuServe Messages

Andrew, I suppose if any of us had the answer to competing in this commodity market, we wouldn't have the time to be here to talk about it <grin>! I too have looked at the DTP and DTV "revolutions" on the desktop computer for insights. I admit my quick-look barely scratched the surface, but it's hard to miss the fact that the tools to do these DTP and DTV things are now available (at varying levels of capability and price) to just about anyone that wants to do it. And as technology marches on, this equation just seems to strengthen. I suspect the same will occur for the MM "revolution." The only thing really left is to decide what market you want to pursue and what you can offer that distinquishes your efforts from your competitors (while still maintaining a "competitive" price). I think your comments on the low-end market are right on the mark: sell high volume to stay liquid then pray you don't have to provide any further service or the market doesn't take a downturn! Sounds a lot like the good old mail-order company <grin>. I agree with you that the SCALA market, via their pricing, appears to be oriented for the higher-end (professional). It has apparently worked for them and that's without a freely distributable player/runtime module. I find that extremely interesting! Can't argue with you that CLONEs and MACs are more accepted – it's pretty much fact based on the numbers sold. However, I also don't believe these huge numbers of CLONEs and MACS are much suited to perform the impressive MM stuff one can achieve on the humble Amiga. Humm, let me get cruel: I don't need a CDROM to do MM on an Amiga <ah, that felt real good>. I suspect that if this was not true, then SCALA would have been history long ago — they don't have a Windows version (yet) to keep them a float and the Amiga version doesn't (yet) come on CDROM <grin>. I do understand what you are getting at <wink>. If your client demands the solution be run on all their installed based of machines, you currently don't have much choice :-(. On a more optimistic note for us Amiga connoisseurs that may also be courting this type of market, the future will hopefully bear some good news (if the Amiga is ever put back into production – darn, way too many ifs!). SCALA is working on a miracle to make a CLONE perform Amiga magic (while hopefully retaining Amiga compatibility/interoperability). Jerrell Nickerson is attempting a similar type miracle for HELM. If these folks are successful, then we have some real choices! Interesting observation about he PowerMAC's ability to playback animations. I've heard and read so much hype about the PowerMAC's ability to handle digital video and audio that I figured animation would be a piece of cake. Just out of curiosity, was the animation player program a native mode application or was it run under 68K emulation, and what was the pixel size of the animation view? I didn't know the Director supported CDi and 3DO platforms. That makes it far more viable in my mind, even though they have ignored the Amiga. I think it's strange that MacroMedia's ad for Director 4.0 for Windows doesn't mention this cross platform capability, but then again, it's for the CLONEHEADs and they don't know much beyond MicroSoft. Kind of makes you want to know when MS is going to release their "defacto standard" MM authoring package doesn't it <grimace>? I realize that MPEG is an animation (!) format which does not bind itself to any particular hardware (although some dedicated hardware can make one heck of a difference) and that is part of what makes it a great standard. Now if an authoring application could achieve the same level of independance (having it available for other platforms moves along these same lines), we would be in a really tough commodity market <grin>! I suspect that if X-Script ends up being expensive, it will lose a lot of ground to becoming a real standard — it's been my observation that most successful "standards" don't cost the end-users much money. OK, I give — what's this `IICS "InforMedia" Newsletter' all about? EdV