Firefox OS To Fuel Panasonic TVs, Chromecast-Like Devices

Panasonic will embed Firefox OS in its 2015 smart TVs, and Matchstick announced a Chromecast-like Firefox OS platform, to be used by Philips/AOC and TCL.  Aside from some modest success for Mozilla’s Firefox OS, Mobile Linux operating systems not called Android haven’t gotten very far on smartphones. Yet an assortment of Linux-based OSes — of which Android is but one — increasingly dominate the smart TV market.

The latest player to jump into the Linux-based TV fray is Panasonic. This week at CES 2015, Panasonic followed up on its CES 2014 announcement that it was collaborating with Mozilla on a Firefox OS based smart TV with new plans to do just that with four new Life+Screen Smart TVs to be released this Spring.

Also at CES, Matchstick, which recently introduced a Chromecast-like, Firefox OS based Matchstick dongle for only $25, announced an open source “Flint” hardware video-streaming platform, based on the Matchstick design. Philips/AOC and TCL will be early Flint OEMs...