Panasonic makes first Firefox OS TVs available

The first Panasonic Viera smart TVs with Firefox OS are available in Europe, including the Benelux. The rest of the world will follow in the coming months. Panasonic will initially supply six models with the open source operating system.

Mozilla writes that on its blog. More than a year ago, Panasonic and Mozilla announced that the first TVs with the OS would come out last year, but that release was postponed for unknown reasons. The televisions in question are the so-called Life+Screen Smart televisions with model numbers CR850, CR730, CX800, CX750, CX700 and CX680.

The televisions are optimized for HTML5 and rely heavily on web apps and use Mozilla’s WebAPI. It must be possible to stream content to the television via devices with a Firefox browser or Firefox OS.

According to Panasonic, the partnership with Mozilla allowed the “openness and flexibility of Firefox OS” for the TV builder to design a more “easy-to-use and more customizable user interface” than any other smart TV OS.