Techniques and mechanisms for communicating sideband information in a data frame including video data. In an embodiment, a data frame is exchanged between two device via a hardware interconnect which is compatible with physical layer requirements of an interface specification. The interface specification identifies a data frame format comprising a total of X consecutive horizontal lines of vertical blanking data and a total of Y consecutive horizontal lines of data including video data. In another embodiment, vertical blanking data of the data frame includes only (X−N) consecutive horizontal lines of data. Active data of the data frame includes N horizontal lines of data including sideband data, and Y additional horizontal lines of data including video data.