The Chromecast is an incredibly popular little widget. It essentially takes the annoying parts out of streaming your media to your TV by allowing you to pair pretty much anything to your TV. Well, anything that Google approves of, which is something of a sticking point for some. So Matchstick wants to offer all the functionality with none of the strings.
Streaming Like A River
Essentially, Matchstick is just a Chromecast built on a different software framework. Namely, it’s built on Firefox, the browser Chrome is competing with to be the browser you download and start using after you get sick of your computer’s stock browser. Firefox has a commitment to open source, naturally, even when that leads them to unfortunate stands like not supporting H.264.
There are other factors as well; for one thing, installing Firefox is pretty cheap. So this will be at a low price point to compete with Google’s little dongle. In fact, the Kickstarter version is available for just $18.
Video Stars
So, what can you stream through your Matchstick? Well… pretty much anything. The key pitch here is that it can stream anything from anything. Plug it in and connect it to your network, and it will read your NAS and allow you to find and stream files from that. Just want to put up a video from your phone? Matchstick has an “ad hoc” functionality that lets you do precisely that. In other words, it’s pretty useful. That said, I wish they were using a powered HDMI standard, but you can’t have everything, I suppose. Besides, for cheap streaming, it’s hard to argue with a $18 dongle.
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