It's like what FireWire was to USB, but hopefully it has a better fate.

Wasn't FireWire also massively encumbered in patents and very expensive licenses? I may be misremembering...

If so it'd be different in that regard. I was thinking of it more as the better-engineered underdog that lost out to the more corporate-friendly option.

IIRC it had full duplex unlike USB 1/2, it launched well before USB with a fast 400Mbps transfer speed and its hardware controller was sophisticated enough that it could work without much intervention from the OS.

But looking into the history, the patent situation was indeed grim. Likely that's what kept it in an Apple and DV niche until USB caught up.

Jobs wanted too much money for firewire and Intel wanted to get PC dominance by having USB everywhere. The lack of firewire adoption is mostly afaik on Jobs.

I don't think there was an implication that this would be bad

I guess, bad for the HDMI patent pool members.

Not bad, but it's hard to think of a reason why they're doing this

It's protecting your standard from being used by others when wide adoption is the only thing that differentiates your standard from others

i.e. they're shooting themselves in the foot

"by failing to give away their product for free, this IP-licensing organization is really only losing in the end!"

Display port over USB-C is awesome. HDMI isn't needed anymore.