It's not HDMI and DRM increasing the costs. HDMI is a far higher bandwidth signal than composite/SVideo, as is USB3. So you have to design a more complex chip a

It's not HDMI and DRM increasing the costs. HDMI is a far higher bandwidth signal than composite/SVideo, as is USB3. So you have to design a more complex chip and PCB. These are slightly more niche products too, so you don't get the economy of scale you would with something like an ARM SoC. Also these UVC grabber deal in uncompressed video, so they are more expensive but produce a far higher quality capture. The £45 Cat5 grabber is performing some pretty heavy compression to fit the HD video signal down a 100 Mbit Ethernet connection.