The story is a long one and boring to everyone, I am sure.
We are essentially a design house, offering IP cores (proven design blocks) and some modules (mostly to support those IP cores). Our background is high end video, including broadcast and industrial inspection. We were asked to design an ISP for a security camera by a small company in Hong Kong.
New to the security business, I became aware that the HD interface they were using was HD-SDI and given the requirements (long distance, cheap cable) it seemed wholy unsuitable. So I made a proposal to this company for an analogue transmission method which I called HD-CVI. As it was based on NTSC it did not seem to be to be patentable (it isn't) so I proposed it as an open standard and wrote that article. We produced demonstrators for it and showed at at a Broadcast exhibition in 2010 (who also have requirements for long distance transmission).
Lots of other stuff happened, but to to target the Dahua/HikVision/TechPoint relationship only. We had demonstrated aCVi to HikVision but they showed little interest from their management. We were then made aware of Dahua's release of HD-CVI and we were told it was essentially a copy of our proposal. We have never had any (or very little) contact with Dahua. Their HD-CVI is their own, but the principals behind it are the same as our proposal. We renamed HD-CVI to aCVi to avoid any confusion.
Dahua then filed for patents which, as a (very) long experiened video engineer, are nonsense, and also we could prove prior art. But for us to challenge the patents in China was a no-win situation. We did work briefly with another company to support them challenging Dahua's patents but they did not pursue it.
TechPoint bought the aCVi IP cores from us, but we have had no contact with them since and they have not used us as consultants.
We decided not to continue selling aCVi into the security market - or at least make no active efforts to do so. We always designed aCVi to broadcast specifications (SMPTE), we only have a discrete solution (no IC) and therefore we concentrate on other long distance transmission markets which have more margin.
(By the way, not that it matters, but I do have formal engineering qualifications. :-))
I am happy to answer any other questions anyone may have - but I do not want to be drawn into a 'who is better' war. The answer to that is aCVi - obviously!
(And by the way - watch out for a new 'aCVi' in about 5 month's time. We won't be publishing any technical information this time!).