Christian Heilmann
While Mozilla has gone to some pains to distance itself from a Firefox OS-based streaming TV stick project, the company acknowledged on Tuesday that it has been providing a hardware maker with engineering support to make the Chromecast rival.
The as-yet-unnamed product is due out later this year from aBitCool and will be released globally, a Mozilla representative said, with pricing and other details yet to be released.
“The device is an HDMI-streaming stick that allows the user to fling content from compatible mobile or Web apps to an HDTV,” Mozilla said, while reiterating its earlier claim that it “is not a Mozilla project.”
A report from Gigaom begged to differ, saying that Mozilla had indeed been working closely with a hardware partner on the device.
Discussion of the effort cropped up last week after a Twitter posting by Mozilla developer evangelist Christian Heilman with a picture of a prototype.
Mozilla has focused most of its Firefox OS efforts on getting the operating system adopted for low-end smartphones, although Panasonic has also said it plans to use the software for use in smart TVs.
