Getting Started - Setup & How-to

[pherendeen]

First, my sincere apologies if this should have been posted somewhere else.

I am an IT person at a children's hospital and I was recently approached by a content manager for our in-house TV station. He had an idea to bring our content onto a streaming platform so that our patients and their parents can choose what content to bring up, and we thought Roku's platform would be the easiest to develop on and to host. Our current dilemma is in regards to the devices themselves: we were trying to come up with a way to manage the devices easily and efficiently (read: only have the channels we prefer and limit what other channels can be accessed), to have each Roku work independently without the need for individual Roku accounts, to easily reset the Rokus after each stay, and to lock down the Rokus so that they aren't easily tampered with. In short, I'm looking for Apple Configurator for the Roku platform.

I'm not sure that Roku Powered is right for us because we don't need the billing aspect of it as well as trying to keep costs down - there's really no need to build a new player. (Although admittedly, it would be cool to see our branding on the menus...)

Thoughts and ideas? Thanks very much in advance! 

[atc98092]

Unfortunately, Roku won't work the way you'd like. When attached to a Roku user account, all players will have the same channels available. Remove a channel from one and it is removed from all. Now you could certainly install only the channels desired, then use a PIN to block users from adding or removing channels. 
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But the other issue might be your in-house TV service. Depending on how you are sending the signal out, a Roku may or may not even be able to display your content. If you're sending out different broadcasts via a digital TV RF channel, then no Roku player can display it. Naturally, any Roku TV could. If' it's going over a network as IPTV, again I don't think any Roku device of any kind could display it. Need more info about how the signal is sent to your displays. 

[trekkeriii · Accepted solution]

As a System Administrator for a Hospital and a long-time Roku user, no, Roku is not for hospitals. If my management approached me, I would say bad idea. Might want to look at Apple TV and use a Mobile Device Management platform. I see on AirWatch, that AppleTV is a platform it can manage. Since tvOS and iOS are similar, makes sense. You mentioned Apple Configurator, which basically does what an MDM does, but would be a pain to have to always connect the things to a MAC to setup and manage.

[atc98092]

Yeah, my government phone uses AirWatch (now called Hub for some strange reason). Since I'm not an admin for the system, I don't know exactly how much control they can do, as I still have a lot of control of my phone. But yeah, ATV might be one option, especially if you'd like some sort of centralized control. 

[trekkeriii]

"atc98092" wrote:
Yeah, my government phone uses AirWatch (now called Hub for some strange reason). Since I'm not an admin for the system, I don't know exactly how much control they can do, as I still have a lot of control of my phone. But yeah, ATV might be one option, especially if you'd like some sort of centralized control. 

Actually they are rebranding it Workspace One, which is confusing as also the Citrix Admin, Citrix Receiver became Citrix Workspace. Ugh... Anyways, semi-OT. We can continue in an OT thread..

Back on topic, though. One other thing to consider with Roku is lack of Proxy or Network Authentication support, so you'd have to configure a totally separate subnet/VLAN from the rest of your devices and open up switch ports or use a standard SSID on wireless with WPA2 Personal authentication. We have our network set so if you plug in a non-domain joined device to the network, you get thrown on a guest VLAN and cannot talk to our Domain Controllers or rest of our devices on that network. We push the certificates and SSID/Password via GPO on Windows, and Airwatch on our iOS devices.

I work for a local non-profit community hospital. Our CEO so happens to be a former CIO, so he hired a knowledgeable CIO and we actually got our network very secure compared to when I started there. It was bad when I got there, they were selling used PCs to employees without wiping the disks first. I think the first thing I did was create an SDELETE script with a 7pass wipe within a WinPE session to correct that.

[trekkeriii]

I had a thought and this might make this thread more of a major feature/business model change request.

So, here's what Roku should do. I don't know if they would need to release a separate firmware or separate model, but create a Roku Business site. Similar to Apple's Business site. No need to worry about an MDM third party really, because Roku is not used for anything but streaming like iPads and such. Anyways, allow for entry of Roku Serials (maybe even have a purchase program that puts pre-populates the devices into that list) with MAC addresses and such (we could use the MAC addresses to put on the Network Authentication bypasses). Doubles as an Asset Management. You can already name Roku's via my.roku.com, so that's not really much of a change. In addition, implement a private channel store and an option to pre-populate channels to those Rokus. Not sure how the guest mode works, but could use that as a means to clear out user's credentials (good for a hotel or hospital model). Businesses that want to serve their own Channels can just create a private channel like any other developer can, you can just add the private channel to the Private Channel Store as an option. Also, set the Roku's to auto-link to a single account (the business account). Make this a paid program (pay by the number of devices or something). Something to think about.

[pherendeen]

Thank you both @trekkeriii @atc98092 for your thoughts!

We were originally thinking Roku after seeing how easy it would be to create the channel on Roku's platform versus other platforms and after knowing more about the CDN we use for our in-house training platform. Oh well, back to the drawing board.