Hardware Kickstarters are a risky business, but the makers of Matchstick have the hardware all nailed down. This is a streaming stick similar to the Chromeacast, but it's based on Firefox OS. There is apparently an appetite for such a thing because it's only taken a few days to smash through the original $100k funding goal.

[kickstarter]https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2040419302/matchstick-the-streaming-stick-built-on-firefox-os[/kickstarter]

Matchstick will have more powerful hardware than the Chromecast, and it's a completely open platform. The company is encouraging developers to come up with new ways to use Matchstick that go beyond the dumb receiver capabilities of the Chromecast. There's still no 5GHz WiFi, though. As for video content, Matchstick will apparently have support for many Chromecast apps at launch. It should show up in the Cast menu as a target device. The creators are promising access to the likes of Netflix, YouTube, and Vudu, but developers can quickly recompile any Chromecast app to work with Matchstick.

The Matchstick folks are pretty serious about this open platform thing—you can download the schematics for the hardware right now. This is encouraging not only from an ethical perspective, but it shows how far along the project is. All the early bird perks are gone, but you can still get a Matchstick streaming stick for $18 with February 2015 delivery. The retail price will be $25.

[Kickstarter]