Licenses for video codecs are sold because people want them, the chip can decode them, and it would obviously be stupid to bake that cost in to the base price w

Licenses for video codecs are sold because people want them, the chip can decode them, and it would obviously be stupid to bake that cost in to the base price when only a subset of users want them. The Foundation doesn't want to see your business model - they don't distribute VideoCore documentation, that is intellectual property of Broadcom and they decide who they share it with.