Matchstick TV was a project started on

Kickstarter Kickstarter is an American public benefit corporation based in Brooklyn, New York, that maintains a global crowdfunding platform focused on creativity. The company's stated mission is to "help bring creative projects to life". As of July 2021, ...

in September 2014 with the tag line "The Streaming Stick Built on Firefox OS". It was described as an "Open hardware and software platform" device built on

Firefox OS Firefox OS (project name: ''Boot to Gecko'', also known as ''B2G'') is a discontinued open-source operating system made for smartphones, tablet computers, smart TVs, and dongles designed by Mozilla and external contributors. It is based on th ...

and

OpenFlint OpenFlint is an open technology used for displaying ("casting") content from one computerized device on the display of another. Usually this would be from a smaller personal device (like a smartphone) to a device with a larger screen suitable for vi ...

. The Matchstick was to work similar to the

Chromecast Chromecast is a line of digital media players developed by Google. The devices, designed as small dongles, can play Internet-streamed audio-visual content on a high-definition television or home audio system. The user can control playback with ...

, so the user can "fling" content from a smartphone to a Wi-Fi connected Matchstick to show the content on a TV. The project's original completion date was February 2015 but Matchstick's controversial 2015 decision to add

digital rights management Digital rights management (DRM) is the management of legal access to digital content. Various tools or technological protection measures (TPM) such as access control technologies can restrict the use of proprietary hardware and copyrighted works. ...

(DRM) delayed and ultimately killed the product. On February 6, 2015 Matchstick announced the devices would not ship that month and would be delayed until August 2015, citing the addition of DRM as the reason for the delay. On August 3, 2015, the project officially ended due to issues implementing DRM into Firefox OS, and the Matchstick team offered refunds to the backers.

Boing Boing ''Boing Boing'' is a website, first established as a zine in 1988, later becoming a group blog. Common topics and themes include technology, futurism, science fiction, gadgets, intellectual property, Disney, and left-wing politics. It twice won ...

called the decision "suicide-by-DRM," citing backers who wanted the product as originally specified without DRM. The commercial company behind the product seems to be Purplecomm, Inc. according to payment and refund information of the Amazon payment system.

References

External links

Matchstick - The Streaming Stick Built on Firefox OS
project on Kickstarter * {{twitter, MatchStickTV Firefox OS