Intel gets all the HDCP money

WE HAD a chance to speak to a nice chap called Joe Lee and we learned a whole lot about HDMI and HDCP from him. Joe is a technology "evangelist" at HDMI Licensing and knows this area as the palm of his hand.

We confirmed us that HDMI body get some small royalty and has an annual fee for all the supporters but more important we learned that Intel gets 100 per cent royalty from HDCP.

It is not a big secret that Intel developed HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection) and you can read all about it here. For us, it was interesting to learn that the big Intel get all the money for and from it.

The annual membership fee for HDCP is a saucy $15000 and if you don't pay it up you can simply forget about calling your product HDCP compliant. Intel also gets the money for a physical key necessary for HDCP and the manufacturer has to spend only $0.5 cent (half cent) to get it. Intel usually charges chaps such as Silicon image or other chip manufacturer for it but we have a strong feeling that the graphic manufactures have to pay it up. Maybe Nvidia and ATI pay the annual membership and then give the licences to its partner and berry the cost of the key in the price. It is really a tiny amount.

But theoretically if you want to use HDMI you need to spend at least $15,000.05 to get it going. In graphic card industry you can store the physical HDMI key in the cards bios, that's why they all claim they are HDMI compliant. µ