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Appendix D: A Brief History of DPS
We were originally founded in 1975 as Digital Video Systems. DVS was a pioneer in the development of time base
correctors (TBCs) and synchronizers. The company’s first product, the DVS1 Time Base Corrector, was sufficiently
ahead of its time that many of them are still being used today.
DVS was acquired by Scientific Atlanta in 1982 and the focus of the division shifted to satellite encryption
technologies. In 1988, the studio video product line was spun off into a new employee-owned company called Digital
Processing Systems (DPS). In 1996 DPS went public, with a very successful initial public offering (IPO) of over three
million shares.
Today, while DPS continues to innovate and expand its line of traditional broadcast products, the company experiences
significant growth in the computer video marketplace. DPS entered the computer video field in 1991 with the
introduction of the DPS Personal TBC, the first infinite window TBC on a PC card. The DPS Personal TBCs
combination of features, performance and price was unique, and competed with units selling for three times its cost.
After the success of this TBC card, DPS followed with the Personal TBC II, III and IV, each of which provided
increased features and performance. Another innovation was the DPS Personal V-Scope, the world’s first combination
waveform monitor/vector scope on a PC card.
The DPS Personal Animation Recorder (PAR), a plug-in card which functions as a single-frame recording deck, was
introduced soon after the first Personal TBC and quickly became one of our most popular products. Still selling in both
PC and Amiga versions — a testament to how far ahead of the rest of the industry it was — the PAR provides
component analog video (Betacam, MII), composite and S-Video (Hi-8/SVHS) outputs.
The DPS Perception Video Recorder (PVR) is a significant advancement beyond the PAR. First shipped in 1995, the
multiple-award-winning PVR is a PCI-bus digital video disk recorder which features 10-bit video encoding with 2X
oversampling, CCIR 601 4:2:2 processing and an integrated SCSI-2 hard drive controller. The PVR is also designed to
integrate with third-party non-linear editing software.
Fulfilling the promise of the PVR to be “the heart of an advanced digital video workstation,” DPS has built a family of
products that work with the PVR to create a complete video-audio editing solution. These products include the AD-
2500/3500 Component Video Capture daughter card; the SD-2500/3500 Serial Digital Video I/O card; the Perception
F/X transition effects accelerator card; and the Perception Audio for Video (A4V) board.
A key contributor to the quality and remarkable capabilities of DPS’s computer video products has been our lengthy
experience in the broadcast studio field, and our traditional broadcast product line is still going strong. In the last year-
and-a-half alone we introduced the DPS MicroSYNC-X 10-bit four-field video synchronizer card; the DPS
MicroSYNC-AVX stereo audio/video synchronizer system; and the DPS-465 Serial Digital Video Synchronizer.
Digital Processing Systems’ corporate headquarters and manufacturing facilities are in Toronto, Canada. Sales, service
and distribution facilities for the United States are located in Florence, KY, adjacent to the Greater Cincinnati/Northern
Kentucky Airport. A United Kingdom office oversees European operations from London, and Asia and Pacific Rim
countries are serviced by our office in Sydney, Australia.
