The developers of non-certified channels for Roku were notified in advance that Roku was going to be implementing a new system for channel development and that all non-certified channels running on the then-current system were going to be dropped. Although these channels ran on the Roku platform, they were really outside the standard Roku channel store system.
I know this notification went out at least 4 months ahead of time, but I'm not a developer and don't know if anything went out to developers earlier than that.
This is hardly "without warning". The developers had time to get their channels certified and moved to the regular Roku system. Those that did not knew their Roku channels were going to go away and largely failed to notify their users. Many claimed they were being censored due to the nature of their content -- this is not the case.
I tried to load a channel I've had before and the site does nothing on the first try and redirects to a 404 page on the second attempt. The process I use is this:
1. log in
2. Go to https://my.roku.com/account/add?channel=uzzu
3. Click OK on the warning page
4. Click the "Yes, add channel" button (nothing happens in the UI, though I see network activity)
5. Click the "Yes, add channel" button again (get a 404 page)
On step 4 above, I watch the network traffic and see a 500 error with a "x-cache: Error from cloudfront" response header on the api request to https://my.roku.com/account/api/v1/user/channels
Given there's no useful error like "This channel is not certified" or "The channel requested is not allowed", I'm led to assume this is a problem with the Roku site.
Can someone confirm one way or the other? And if it's a channel I'm not allowed to add, can we update the user experience to reflect that so users don't have to search the web to figure out what's happened?
Thanks!
Everyone upset that they won't let you add private channels anymore there isn't much you can do, Roku doesn't care. But the best thing you can do is choose NOT to purchase any Roku products in the future and try to encourage other Roku users you know to do the same. I won't be buying any more Roku devices unless they reverse course and allow us to add private channels again. That was something that made Roku great, now the product is worse and the customer support is a joke!
