Matchstick, The More Open Chromecast, Destroyed By DRM, Announces Plans To Return All Funds

from the drm-sucks dept

After struggling with the DRM development based on Firefox OS for most of this year, we realize continued development of DRM, though showing early signs of promise, will be a long and difficult road. We have come to the conclusion that we will not be able to reliably predict the completion date of the DRM development without significantly more research, development and integration.



We feel the only responsible thing to do now is to refund 100% of the pledge money to our backers. You have been very patient with us, and we feel announcing another major delay in the Matchstick delivery would not be fair to our backers. We apologize for not being able to update you sooner.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community. Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis. While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

A year ago, a project called Matchstick launched on Kickstarter -- designed to be an open, WiFi connected HDMI stick, built on Firefox OS, to let you stream over the top video to your TV. It was touted as a more open version of the Chromecast device. It got over 17,000 backers (including me) and raised nearly $500,000. It was supposed to be delivered in February of this year but was pushed back after the Matchstick team announced that it had decided to build in DRM support . This angered plenty of people who, quite rightly, noted that they had bought into the vision of anplatform, rather than one that furthered the cause of DRM. However, the Matchstick team had weighed that against the fact that many popular video streaming services, including Netflix, require DRM, and decided that it couldn't exist without DRM. The plan, the team announced, was to ship in August.Well, now it's August, and... the project is dead and Matchstick is refunding everyone's money . Because DRM.Not surprisingly, many of the comments in response to this are asking why the team bothered with DRM in the first place. Multiple people are asking the Matchstick team to go back to its original promise and just ship a device, because that's what they backed and that's what they want. The vast, vast, vast majority of comments look pretty similar to the following:Of course, given that Matchstick was built on Firefox OS and heavily promoted and associated with Mozilla, some will undoubtedly point to Mozilla's decision a little over a year ago to give in and adopt DRM in HTML 5 , something it had fought for a while. While the two are notconnected (and the decision on DRM in Mozilla had been made before the Matchstick product even was announced), it shows how companies that areto build more open, DRM-free offerings, are increasingly being pressured into adding DRM for no good reason.Once again, can someone remind me of a single positive thing that has come from DRM?

Filed Under: drm, firefox os, matchstick, ott, streaming

Companies: matchstick