Mozilla is expanding beyond its awesome Firefox browser and getting hands dirty in the suddenly hot streaming video business.
MatchStick HDMI streaming stick, which will sell for a limited time through Kickstarter at a starting price of $12 before it goes to retail. It’s final price of $25 sets its sights on the Chromecast, the $35 streaming dongle from the Google. Matchstick runs on Mozilla’s Firefox OS, the open source mobile operating system.
With over 17,000 backers and $470,000 in funding, it’s hard to call Matchstick anything but a success for Mozilla.
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“Due to Matchstick’s unique openness, we believe it will lead to a greater number of cool apps and lower price. These are tangible benefits a consumer will readily embrace,” Jack Chang, the US general manager of Matchstick.
“It’s better than Chromecast,” extols the promo video on the Kickstarter page, which humorously shows Matchstick testers getting thrown out of an Ikea furniture store for using the Ikea living room sets to test the Matchstick — and asks for money so they can “shoot a real commercial.”
Both the hardware and software for Matchstick are open-source. Matchstick is built on a dual-core Rockchip 3066 processor, has 4 gigabytes of onboard storage, 1 gigabyte of DDR3 memory, and supports Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n.
Mozilla seems genuinely interested in listening to what their users want, and plans to ensure the features everyone wants make it into the stick.
