decreasing compatibility to increase sales?

Hi Brad,

What exposure/ranking are you talking about? We don't do anything that automatically promotes channels that are not compatible with legacy Roku players.

Hi Patrick,

The channel store (viewed on the roku box not the web) groups channels by compatibility, so channels that are only compatible with R3 are automatically ranked at the top, only R2-R3 are right below those, etc. If you drop compatibility with the older rokus, you will automatically get a higher ranking in the store, increasing exposure.

I suppose the only real question is whether the increased views from the higher ranking outweighs what one might assume to be a limited audience on the older rokus. I'm assuming so, but was curious as to what others here have experienced.

"BradC" wrote:

The channel store (viewed on the roku box not the web) groups channels by compatibility, so channels that are only compatible with R3 are automatically ranked at the top, only R2-R3 are right below those, etc.

I'm not sure how you arrive at this, I dont see this sort of behavior when I goto the Channel store on the player. For instance, if I go into the 'Games' section, 'Rogue' (compatible with all, I believe) is listed higher than 'Angry Birds Space' (available only on Roku 3 I believe) It seems like it might be based on installs or something similar?

"DerekHelps" wrote:

"BradC" wrote:

The channel store (viewed on the roku box not the web) groups channels by compatibility, so channels that are only compatible with R3 are automatically ranked at the top, only R2-R3 are right below those, etc.

I'm not sure how you arrive at this, I dont see this sort of behavior when I goto the Channel store on the player. For instance, if I go into the 'Games' section, 'Rogue' (compatible with all, I believe) is listed higher than 'Angry Birds Space' (available only on Roku 3 I believe) It seems like it might be based on installs or something similar?

It's actually based on usage: viewtopic.php?f=34&t=55959&p=381605#p381605
I suppose it's possible that, since there are more Roku 2/3 users out there, there may be a bias towards those devices, but the majority of the channels I've developed work on all platforms, and I've not noticed lower rankings as a result. In fact, looking through the channel store just now, it looks like the first channel in a lot of the categories are universal channels.

"BradC" wrote:
Hi Patrick,

The channel store (viewed on the roku box not the web) groups channels by compatibility, so channels that are only compatible with R3 are automatically ranked at the top, only R2-R3 are right below those, etc. If you drop compatibility with the older rokus, you will automatically get a higher ranking in the store, increasing exposure.

I suppose the only real question is whether the increased views from the higher ranking outweighs what one might assume to be a limited audience on the older rokus. I'm assuming so, but was curious as to what others here have experienced.

That's not what happens, it's based on usage, across our user base. There are very few channels that are only compatible with Roku 3 -- Angry Birds Space is the only one that comes to mind right this second. The only old Roku players which someone might choose to not support are those running 3.1. Not supporting those can have an impact, but it's not as much as you might think, since those make up an ever-decreasing minority if the Roku install base. I can't think of any reason to omit Roku 3 from support for a channel, Channel Store-related or otherwise.

"RokuPatrick" wrote:

That's not what happens.

Yep, it is exactly what happens.

Thanks for taking the time to answer. I had assumed it was intentional, since it has been happening since before the UI upgrade as well, but if it's not intentional, then it's definitely a defect in the store code.


I suppose I'm too much of a stats nerd since it's so obvious to me and apparently invisible to everyone else. hehe. Luckily I find this kind of stuff pretty interesting, so I'll try to demonstrate.



We'll use 2 roku models for the comparison, the r1HD and the Roku2. This should keep things fairly simple. We'll also mostly ignore those 4 or so "special" channels that have their own compatiblity rules for simplicity's sake.


Baseline, the web channel store is a good one, (we'll see why later) let's take the games section as our sample.


If we make a spreadsheet of this info, we get some base info.

open the linked spreadsheet and take a look.


Sheet 1


the "Web Rank" column is the base ranking. This is what we'd expect.

the "R1.x Rank" column is the order on the Roku1(HD). This is also what we'd expect. It's basically the same exact list as the web store, in the same order, with R1 incompatible channels removed.


So far, so good.


On "Sheet2" We've added a "R2 Rank" column listing the channel ranking on the roku2 store.

Look closely. It should be pretty obvious from anayzing this sheet what has happened. Each of the channels that is R1 compatible has been skipped, and only the R2 channels are then ranked in order. After that, the remaining channels are added incrementally at the bottom. This is completely incorrect, and should match the "web order" column.



On the next sheet "Compatibility Order", we have resorted the data by the ranking on the R2 store. It should be pretty obvious here when we look at the web rank and the compatibility what we are looking at.



Summary: the ranking is EXACTLY sorted by compatibility, then original ranking as compared to the Web Store. There is zero overlap. No doubt at all this is what is happening in the R2 and R3 stores. So, if you drop compatibility for the R1+, your channel will get a higher ranking and more visibility on the roku. (But, if this is a defect that might be fixed, the question is moot)

No one else cares...

never said you had to. Thanks for being rude though.

The title of your thread is rude...

Be nice everyone.

You're misinterpreting what you're seeing, though I can see where you might be lead to that conclusion. We do not artificially disadvantage any channel's based strictly on it's compatibility, though our usage metrics may weight usage on different models differently. For instance, we may sort games based on usage on Roku2 and Roku3, since these are our "gaming" products. The result would be that the order may show that those games that take advantage of Roku2's gaming features tend to be more popular on the Roku2, for obvious reasons. If a game had a lot of usage on Roku2, it would be right up there, regardless of for which platforms it was available.

The web channel store may use a different usage metric, since a large part of the web channel store is helping new users find out what's popular on the products that are currently offered for sale.

The short of it is, get more people to use your channel and it will have a better position, regardless of the platforms it supports. And reduced compatibility won't up the channel's position, just reduce its availability.