There’s a new project on Kickstarter that aims to take on the Chromecast. It’s called Matchstick, the streaming stick built on Firefox OS. For those of you who don’t know Chromecast is a HDMI dongle from Google that works over Wi-Fi and plugs into your HDTV, allowing you to stream content – such as movies, TV, music, games, and more – from your laptop or mobile device to the big screen.
Matchstick is exactly the same concept. However as you may have guessed Matchstick doesn’t run on Google software, it will utilise the Firefox OS an open source mobile operating system built by Mozilla on Firefox’s underlying engine which as the open source part would suggest is free to use.
Chromecast isn’t the only contender Matchstick is going up against, we already have similar devices from heavy hitters like Amazon’s Fire TV, Apple TV, and Roku, all of which have content partnerships with Netflix and the like. Matchstick is claiming however that Netflix, HBO Go, Pandora, and others will be on board as its developer community grows and new apps become available.
Matchstick might be able to live up to its claims, should it succeed on Kickstarter. The project has been getting support from Mozilla as well, in that the company apparently helped the Matchstick team develop a streaming stick that was low cost but also high design and adaptable “without the walled garden for app developers that tends to slow progress”
“We also approached the hardware as a break even, open reference design, creating an app ecosystem where the app developers drive the economy,” explained Matchstick through its Kickstarter page. “It’s what Chromecast wanted to be.”
Matchstick has currently received $73,942 in pledged after just one day, and it still has 29 days left to go and about $30,000 more to raise (as of 4:30 PM PST on 30 September). You could pledge $18 to get a streaming stick, with delivery sometime in February, if they succeed.