DVP Media is a multimediasoftware house. Founded as Digital Video Productions in 1993, it was the first multimedia company to apply interactive digital video media to industrial training applications. The first published DVP product was a 32-disc series of automotive training materials which were the result of a joint venture with the government of the State of Queensland in Australia. Because the ability of PCs to play full-screen, full-motion, digital video was somewhat limited in the early ‘90s, the first release of this software was on the now defunct CD-i format. CD-i was a format developed by Philips of Eindhoven, and was known as the Green Book standard. CD-i used a consumer player and a television set for display, not a computer. Although very useful and easy to use, and widely accepted in the automotive training industry, CD-i was a commercial flop, and subsequent releases of DVP’s automotive training products were on CD-ROM, and more recently, DVD-ROM, DVD, and online via the web. DVP was sold to Telecom New Zealand in 1996, but a management buyout returned the company to the original founders in 1997, when it became DVP Media. In 1999, DVP Media raised substantial venture capital to expand its production and sales operations, and relocated its headquarters from Brisbane, Australia, to Chicago, Illinois, United States. After the dot-com collapse, DVP Media was again the subject of a management buyout in 2001 by three of the original founders. Refocused on its core business, and trading as CDX Global, DVP Media became the largest and most innovative supplier of multimedia training materials to the automotive industry. Their products have very high customer satisfaction ratings and are used by almost 100% of the automotive schools and colleges in Ireland and in Australia, approximately 50% of those in the UK, and 20% of the schools and colleges in the U.S. and Canada. DVP Media holds the patent for self-loading and self-configuring CD-ROMs. Prior to DVP’s invention, CD-ROM programs usually required some installation process and then some configuration of the PC system to suit the program. DVP invented an installation-free process wherein the program interrogates the system it is being asked to play in, and then reconfigures such things as its playback window size or video frame rate to optimize itself for the system. This is a patent that DVP is yet to defend. In 2009, the CDX assets of the company were purchased for an undisclosed sum by Jones & Bartlett, an educational publisher based in Boston, USA.
