The channel, run by the United Video Satellite Group (UVSG), had its roots in the Electronic Program Guide (EPG), an ’80s-era channel programming platform that initially ran on a network of Atari 800 computers. More than 40 million people had access to the Prevue Guide in 1995, and by telling you what was on the air, it played a utility role nearly as important as your remote control. That was the Prevue Guide, which may not have gotten the attention of the MTV, TBS, or Nickelodeon in those days, but served an important purpose: It was the channel you watched to see what was on those channels. But the most notable use of the Amiga in cable television didn’t actually rely on Video Toaster at all. If you subscribed to cable television in the ’90s, you most likely saw Video Toaster in action on the cable dial. While Commodore shut down in 1994, Newtek is still around. Video Toaster was so successful that it upstaged the Amiga platform as a whole, particularly in the United States. They said things like, ‘This is unbelievable, this is revolutionary that you can do this in a box for this price,’” Newtek’s Paul Montgomery said in a 1990 interview with the PBS show Computer Chronicles. “We showed the Toaster recently at the National Association of Broadcasters show-this is where the engineers go to buy their stuff-and they came by the booth. Video Toaster, which at first was only compatible with the Amiga, made it possible to do complex video editing at a small fraction of the cost of specialized professional video-editing platforms, and that made it popular with public-access TV stations. (Photo: Matt Chan/CC BY-ND 2.0)Īs a result, the Amiga quickly became the cable industry’s computer of choice in the pre-HDTV era, especially after the release of NewTek’s Video Toaster in 1990. Previous offerings, such as the Atari 800, were able to put messages onto a television screen, though not without much in the way of pizzazz. )įor cable providers, the Amiga’s capabilities for displaying content on a television were a bit of a godsend. ( Ars Technica has a long-running series about the Amiga. And seeing as “Amiga” is the Spanish word for friend with a feminine ending, it was also friendlier than its office-drone competitors. The Amiga was a much-loved machine, huge among a cult of users who embraced its impressive video and audio capabilities, which blew away every other platform at the time of its release.Īs a multimedia powerhouse, it was ahead of both the Apple Macintosh and the IBM PC by nearly a decade at the time of its 1985 release, and its launch price was a relatively inexpensive $1,295, making the computer a bit of a bargain at launch. The set-top box, the power-sucking block that serves as the liaison between you and your cable company, is a common sight in homes around the country these days.īut before all that was the Commodore Amiga, a device that played a quiet but important role in the cable television revolution. In fact, the magazine was already looking awful obsolete in the 1980s and 1990s, when cable systems around the country began dedicating entire channels to listing TV schedules. In terms of planning our lives around what our TVs spit out, we’ve come a long way from the overly condensed pages of TV Guide. (Photo: Kaiiv/Pixel8/CC BY-SA 3.0)Ī version of this post originally appeared on the Tedium newsletter.
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