Well, there are no DRM issues with HDMI. The board manufacturer has to be a signatory to the HDCP [1] contract in order to be able to decrypt content. There are other design requirements, such as you decrypted data bus traces can't be on an outside layer on the PCB. It's been years since I looked at that stuff, there's more but I can't remember it. In terms of licensing, yes, if I remember correctly there are two tiers, either a $20K or $5K licensing fee and a couple of levels of per-device fees.

In general terms, from what I remember, the content protection agreements in place pretty much favor designs where the HDMI receiver is build into the main board as opposed to daughter cards. Again, in an effort to prevent illegal copying. Which is funny because to a knowledgeable engineer capturing the decrypted data is an almost trivial exercise. The only thing that can make it more difficult are SoC's where the HDMI I/O is built into the chip and you just can't get at raw data anywhere.

Now sure how I feel about the system Hollywood put into place. I do understand the need to protect their product from mass duplication. Perhaps they thought this was the largest threat to their industry. I strongly disagree with this position. I have not purchased a DVD or BlueRay disk in years. I haven't because there are plenty of content sources, including Netflix. I have just-about zero interest in "owning" their content. For the most part there's vastly more useful and interesting content freely available on the Internet covering a myriad of subjects. They may have shot themselves in the foot by wasting so much time and effort with HDCP.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content_...