Mozilla’s Chromecast-style HDMI stick, which is known as Matchstick and powered by the Firefox OS operating system, has made its debut on crowdfunding site Kickstarter.
News of the Matchstick first surfaced in June in a series of tweets from Mozilla’s principal developer evangelist Christian Heilmann, who tweeted a series of photos with a prototype of the device.
Hardware for the device is being developed by Matchstick.TV, a tech startup headquartered in San Jose with an R&D centre in Beijing, in collaboration with Mozilla.
The Matchstick costs $US25 ($28.57), and is expected to ship in February 2015, with app developers being offered the device for free in a campaign mirroring Mozilla’s earlier smartphones for developers promotion.
The device is open source hardware, meaning full schematics are available to third parties who want to build one, and works based on an API library called Fling which allows developers to ‘fling’ content from a smartphone to the HDMI stick.
“Matchstick and Firefox OS is a totally open platform, (both software and hardware), that lets developers explore any streaming content from video to games, and bring their apps onto the big screen in living room,” Matchstick.TV said in a statement.
Andrew Sadauskas is a former journalist at SmartCompany and a former editor of TechCompany.
