The first Panasonic Viera Smart TVs with Firefox OS have become available in Europe. The rest of the world will follow the coming months. Initially the Japanese electronics giant will release 6 TVs with the open source operating system.
About a year ago Panasonic and Mozilla announced that the first TVs with the OS would be released in 2014 but the release was deferred for unknown reasons.
The TVs that now become available are the so called Life+Screen Smart televisions with model numbers CR850, CR730, CX800, CX750, CX700 and CX680.
The TVs are optimized for HTML5 and heavily rely on web apps and use of Mozilla's WebAPI. With devices using a Firefox browser or Firefox OS it's possible to stream content to the TV.
According to Panasonic, their partnership with Mozilla and the openness and flexibility of Firefox OS made sure that the company has been able to create a more user friendly and customizable TV UI.
"This allows us to provide a better user experience for our consumers providing a differentiator in the Smart TV market", according to Masahiro Shinada, Director of the TV Business Division at Panasonic Corporation.
