HDMI is built into the SoC, my guess it's already a part of the cost of the SoC itself.
According to the HDMI
cartel association themselves,
this is not the case. To fully comply with their requirements, the manufacturer must:
- Be an "adopter" ($10k/yr)
- Pay a 5 cent per-device-sold fee
- Submit the device for testing and certification (~$8k based on various google results)
Luckily, reading between the lines, none of this appears to be strictly necessary from a legal standpoint. These requirements seem to be for
trademark licensing and must be met for you to use the HDMI logo on your device and/or packaging. Logically, if you've already bought a licensed part from a manufacturer, all the physical/patent licensing is sorted. As long as you're not using the HDMI logo on your packaging, website, product, or promotional material, I don't think they can go after you.
But I'm not a lawyer, so my common-sense interpretation of this could be bollocks.
I doubt that either TI or a reseller would want to play accountant for a customer. ED as the manufacturer surely has to take care of that, and I guess he will take the "cheaper" route and use the smale scale version with just $5000/anno and $1/unit.
The chip maker and the connector maker no doubt have paid the patent licensing fees - they couldn't sell the parts if they hadn't. You should be covered from a patent perspective.