We’ve been hearing whispers for a little while about a Chromecast competitor from Mozilla that was geared towards supporting a fully open source environment, and it looks like the company plan to head to Kickstarter in order to fund this little streaming stick. It’s going to be called Matchstick, and there can be no doubt that the purpose of this stick is to try and sway users away from Google’s Chromecast.

If you’ve ever used a Chromecast, you know that the $35 streaming stick packs a lot of power into a small package. It’s a fun device to use, but it is 100% controlled by Google. You use the apps that Google allows you to use, and developers have to follow a fairly strict set of rules in order to play in Google’s sandbox. Being the bastion of all things Open Source that they are, you can imagine that this didn’t sit particularly well with Mozilla. It’s hard to get most folks to care about something just because it is Open Source, which is a shame, but Mozilla has other tricks up their sleeve.

This Firefox OS-based streaming stick is designed to make it incredibly simple for developers to port their apps. It should take less than an hour for anyone who has a Chromecast app to become Matchstick ready, and according to Mozilla many Chromecast apps should even support Matchstick out of the box. In a recent interview, Mozilla announced plans to hand out 300 developer kits at their November event to help encourage new development, and the Kickstarter page includes a developer option to ensure these streaming sticks reach users a full two months before they ship out to everyone else.

You’ll also find a promise from Mozilla that major content providers will support Matchstick by the time the consumer versions are shipping, and while there’s no mention of which providers are making this commitment you can see HBO among the streams shown off in the Kickstarter video.

Ultimately Mozilla is promising a lot of things here, but taking to Kickstarter for this project feels like the wrong way to go. Matchstick is supposedly a complete thought already, which makes this Kickstarter more of a pre-order page. Aside from that being against Kickstarter’s own Terms of Service, it’s a zero-risk solution that doesn’t inspire a ton of faith in this project. If Mozilla can deliver a true Chromecast alternative with Matchstick it will be great for everyone, as it will create competition in this space and demonstrate a successful Firefox OS product. Hopefully that’s what we see in January.

http://www.geek.com/mobile/meet-matc...titor-1605654/