January 9, 2012, CES, Las Vegas—Steve Venuti, President of HDMI Licensing presented information on the growth of HDMI in electronics. The HDMI forum also detailed plans for the release of updated specifications.

Unit shipments of HDMI devices was 440M in '09 and has grown to over 685M in '11. The growth is expected to continue, resulting in over 1.2B devices in '15. this rapid growth is in many areas with the greatest volumes in digital TVs with PCs and peripherals close behind. The interfaces are in diverse areas including automotive, mobile phones, PC and peripherals, digital still cameras, digital camcorders, game consoles, AV receivers, Blu-ray (Player/Recorder), DVD (Player/Recorder), streaming media players, set top boxes, and digital TVs.

The number of companies adopting HDMI as an interface has grown to 1166 at the end of the past year. The geographical distribution of the companies reflects the consumer electronics food chain, with China leading followed by Korea, and North America. The widespread adoption of this standard interface is driven by the multi-media on any platform and anywhere forces in the consumers' psyche.

In October '11, the organization announced the HDMI Forum to allow participating companies to participate in the developments of next-generation specifications. Arnold Brown, Chairman, and Rambod Jacoby, President of the HDMI Forum, Inc. stated that the ongoing role of the forum will be to support and develop all future versions of the HDMI Specification, and support and maintain the ecosystem of interoperable HDMI-enabled products. Once new specifications are releases, they will promote these future specifications. They plan to provide open, fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing to meet the needs of the consumer electronics, computer and mobile industries as well as the greater ecosystem of display technologies.

The drivers for change include display and receiver ecosystem improvements, higher resolutions, higher refresh rates, and deeper more lifelike color pallets. As these characteristics change, the industry will need to address technology changes to enable content ecosystem changes, high-resolution 3d gaming, management of our social networks, and more streaming services. The tablets, smart phones, and PCs are the content sources of the future as user-generate content becomes the norm across platforms.

The immediate specification needs include increased bandwidth to accommodate higher resolutions, and broader video timing support. The target release date of the next version of the HDMI specification is in the second half of 2012. the Forum's long term goals are to improve connectivity with mobile devices and allow for improved command and control of various systems.