Matchstick and Mozilla have announced an open-source take on the Chromecast.
It is a $25 Firefox OS-powered HDMI dongle for streaming Internet.
The media stick will be available first through Kickstarter, in the hopes to drive down the price tag.
Jack Chang, Matchstick General Manager in the US, described the device to me as “essentially an open Chromecast.” He explained that while the MSRP is $25 (Google’s Chromecast retails for $35), the Kickstarter campaign is offering a regular price of $18, and an early bird price of $12.
The startup has set a goal of raising $100,000.
Since the Matchstick runs Firefox OS, Mozilla is playing a big role in its debut. It is part of the company’s plan to push the operating system onto more than just smartphones, namely tablets and TVs too.
The two companies share the same vision: the first streaming stick “free of any walled garden ecosystem.” That means the constraints of Google Play don’t exist.
At the moment, Matchstick and Mozilla need developers to create apps, from video to games, for the living room. As such, there is a developer site, a full API library, as well as example sender and receiver apps.
The sender APIs let developers build Android or iOS apps (or edit their existing apps) that can discover a Matchstick device and communicate with a receiver app. There are no plans to support Windows Phone or BlackBerry sender apps, but the architecture is there, so it’s certainly a possibility. Firefox OS sender apps, however, are coming.
Source: TNW
