Community discussions

[RicerDalemon]

Many Roku users would love to share their content on the Roku platform. But the technical hoops one needs to jump through when creating a Roku channel turns many away. Wouldn't it be nice if Roku built a channel much like YouTube? A place that made it easy for users to upload their videos without needing to go to the trouble of building their own Roku channel. It could even be included as a sub-channel of The Roku Channel. This would make it so much easier for Roku owners to get their user-generated content up on their platform. Roku has the talent, servers, and knowledge to make it happen. Not sure if doing this is worth their time but it would sure be nice for end-users to have a simple way to upload their video content directly to Roku.

[atc98092]

This seems like it was asked almost verbatim a couple of weeks ago. And my answer is the same.

Why on earth would Roku want to do that? YouTube and Vimeo already exist for that exact purpose, as well as some smaller sites. The cost would be huge to have the server capacity for storing the media. And they really couldn't offer anything that YouTube doesn't already.

[demsd]

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@atc98092 wrote:

Why on earth would Roku want to do that?

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Advertising.

[atc98092]

Considering what such an infrastructure would cost, I can't imagine advertising being profitable for many, many years. Just too much effort for too little return. There's already several YouTube competitors, and none have even scratched the reach of YT. 

[StreamerUser]

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@demsd wrote:

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@atc98092 wrote:

Why on earth would Roku want to do that?

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Advertising.

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Roku already gets a cut of the advertising in YT et al.

If an app on Roku has advertising, they get their cut.

Better to let someone else far more experienced, capable and with deeper pockets do the heavy lifting for app/service development, and just take the usual ad cut.

[demsd]

Like I said. Advertising. If it weren't about that the Roku Channel wouldn't exist, nor would it have purchased Dataxu, a Boston company that specializes in advertising technology. In fact, it's advertising business outpaces the hardware side of the business.

[StreamerUser]

...and has for several years now, though its recently spent a bundle moving into the programming/content side, now that they have an ongoing means of supporting it...