@Macdaily wrote:
Why non certified. The system has been working great. ...
That kinda depends on what you call "great." For consumers, sure. But for Roku, nightmares.
There are tons of apps that violate content owners right. You do not have the right to watch someone's content outside of any agreements they've entered with providers.
That content is the result of labors, and the owners of that property have rights. Just like if you built a chair, it's your chair. I can't just come into your house and take your chair because I want to.
If you were an author and wrote a book, I couldn't just come into your office and take your manuscript. And, I couldn't legally just photocopy your manuscript for my purposes without your permission. As a content owner, you have rights.
Being rich and successful does not negate these rights. So if Warner Bros. or Universal creates content, they have rights. And some guy in a garage writing an app that lets others view WB or NBCU content without recompense, he's violating the content owner's rights.
Roku has to deal with these situations on a daily basis. These pirates can't get their apps approved in the Channel Store because they're violating content owners rights. Non-certified apps (nee, private channels) don't get vetted. Roku has to react to these. That costs a lot of money to divert resources from development and approval to remediation.
This change doesn't do away with Beta apps. Those will still be around, so developers can publish non-certified apps, but only for a period of time. What's changed is that people won't be able to just leave it there. It'll have to be certified and published through proper means.
After all, this is what Roku intended with non-certified apps (private channels). They were for developers to try them, work out the bugs, then release them officially. It's others that used for a purpose not intended. And now somebody thinks that's a right. No. It was a violation from the get-go, and Roku tolerated it. The blowback because of how some have acted in the non-certified environment became too much. Roku is now enforcing it. They're adding a time limit. That's all. And time's up for a lot of lazy developers.
DBDukes
Roku Community Streaming Expert
Note: I am not a Roku employee.
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