The Thomson licence for DVD Video is called 1C (for One Company) and is 1.3% with a minimum of $1.70 if I remember correctly. To offer MP3 replay requires another licence from a different part of Thomson for $0.75 per unit (minimum $15000 per year) or $1.50 per unit (minimum $5000 per year).

WMA replay and HDCD replay are Microsoft licences and are – by licensing cost standards – very reasonably priced at $0.50 each per unit – less if the manufacturer is producing very large quantities. In addition, there are royalties payable to Dolby for the Dolby Digital 2-channel decoding costing around $4.50 for small companies, or less than $1 for really large ones. (In fact, that is the price for two licence units – one for each channel.) To include HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) companies need an HDMI licence ($15000 per year or $5000 plus $1 per player) and the HDCP licence (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection System) from Intel ($15000 per year). One could omit the HDMI licence if outputting DVI (Digital Visual Interface).

To include DVD-Audio the manufacturer needs a CPPM licence (Content Protection for Pre-recorded Media) at around $6000 per year, along with an MLP licence (Meridian Lossless Packing) from Dolby costing about 50 cents per player for small to medium volumes, less for large ones. Including Dolby 5.1 decoding adds three more licence units (and yet another one for Dolby Pro Logic II), so costs increase to about $12 or $13 here instead of the $4.50 or so mentioned earlier. DTS 5.1 adds another $11 or so for smaller companies, but DTS streaming from the digital output (as most players do) is free of charge.

Anyone producing an AV receiver has to pay similar Dolby Digital and DTS licence fees as above for 5.1 models; these go up a couple more dollars from Dolby and maybe another $6.50 for DTS when making 6.1 or 7.1 channel receivers. THX capability adds yet more to the ex-factory cost – the per-unit fees are confidential but, we’re told, are similar to either of the above.