Were Amigas considered to be exclusively entertainment machines, or did they try to get people to use them for work? I grew up with an IBM XT my dad had on loan from his job, and got the impression that everything else was a (cooler) gaming computer.
"Basic" video editing like adding subtitles or logos to live stream tv (what was not basic at that time) was done with the relatively cheap Amigas. For example the local news program on cable TV could have used an Amiga for rudimentary graphics or transitions between scenes.
I think they also used Amigas for music production, but here it was also Atari ST.
They were used for video work in their day. Babylon 5 used them for effects shots.
I think the big box Amigas were more common across the pond, used for work stuff, in the US than they were in Europe, where the Amiga 500 sold relatively big numbers and was a big gaming machine in the late 80s/early 90s.
They were very popular for video editing, particularly by shops/studios that didn’t have the money for the SGI or Montage systems. NewTek, now known for the TriCaster, built a successful business off of Amiga, first with the Video Toaster and then with Lightwave 3D, one of the first special effects programs.
This is all before my time, but from what professional broadcast and film editors have told me, the lore of Amiga’s dominance in this field is a little bit overblown. They were popular, but it was hardly the industry standard. The high-budget places used other stuff (often proprietary or custom-built) and a lot of broadcasters used live edit bays that were probably less technically capable than a Video Toaster, but were huge and already integrated with their much more complex live camera setups. But the Amiga kicked off what wound up upending post production and live broadcast.
Amiga was definitely ahead of the curve, but Avid, then Adobe and finally Apple, took over starting in 1993 or so (the same year Commodore went bankrupt) and x86 and PowerPC machines got powerful enough that even SGI or Sun boxes weren’t that useful outside of Pixar-style edit farms.
The entire art department at my university used Amigas. They had a couple of video toasters as well. They kept them at least into the mid-90's too.
Otherwise, yeah, I can't recall ever seeing an Amiga in a US business (other than a computer repair shop). IBM dominated the "serious" market, and Apple was in the schools (with some Commodore).
