Bradford, Yorkshire-based Microvitec Plc’s newly-created multimedia subsidiary, MV Multimedia (CI No 1,514) has come up with a digital video board and toolkit. The Digital, Audio and Video Interactive Device is a personal computer board that enables the capture and display of digitised video via a personal computer. The board supports the European PAL and the American NSTC video signal television standards and images can be displayed on any Video Graphics Array screen. It also enables the digitised video images to be stored in the personal computer. Analogue audio comes as standard, but digital requires a software upgrade. The board is principally aimed at developers working at point-of-sale applications. The company dreams of intelligent kiosks sprouting up all over the UK and reckons that the idea has taken off hugely in the US. The kiosks use the audio and video to sell the product to the consumer. The applications would use reworked television images or pictures from an amateur video camera. MV provides a laser cutting facility in Bradford to put the videos onto laser disks. The board is being sold as part of the Insight MM workstation, which consists of a Microvitec monitor and an 80286-based AT-alike personal computer with sound capability and optionally, a laser disk player. The workstation has previously been sold by Microvitec into the education market along with appropiate courseware for multimedia interactive video training applications. Alone, the board costs UKP1,400 for existing AT bus MS-DOS machines, and when bundled with the Insight Workstation, the price is UKP7,000.
