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

from the drm-sucks dept

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 an open platform, 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.

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.

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 without DRM, 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 not directly connected (and the decision on DRM in Mozilla had been made before the Matchstick product even was announced), it shows how companies that are trying to 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