Despite having bizarrely sold off some of its key interests in the field, Digital Equipment Corp remains keen on the television field and has now teamed up with OptImage Inc, way out there in Des Moines, Ioaw to create the industry’s first comprehensive interactive television application development system. The system, to be ready this summer, will include a full set of tools for developing and testing interactive television applications for public and private networks. OptImage will sell the complete system, giving developers a single supplier for all the hardware and software. The system combines OptImage’s MediaMogul authoring, conversion and simulation tools; a software module from DEC enabling users to make server calls from MediaMogul applications; DEC’s application development media server; a David-compatible set-top decoder; and an authoring board for Macintosh or Windows machines. MediaMogul is designed to facilitate the combining of video and audio segments such as images, drawings, animation, full motion MPEG digital video, speech, music and sounds – into sequences and interactive branches that respond to user input. The DEC media server is built around the 64-bit Alpha AXP RISC and includes object-oriented middleware that links the server with StorageWorks disk arrays and digital tape library systems.
