Roku Developer Program

[OddScott]

Gigaom http://gigaom.com/video/netflix-down-xmas-eve/ reported:

Roku has confirmed that its service is also affected by the outage, with Roku players complaining about Internet connectivity issues. A spokesperson sent me the following statement: "Confirmed that the AWS outage is affecting services for some Roku users. Our technical folks are actively monitoring the situation."

Can we please get an explanation of exactly how Roku players were affected by this? For example elsewhere on the dev forum http://forums.roku.com/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=53505 shantyman observed a problem with time syncing that he suspects is related to the AWS outage.

[TheEndless]

I suspect the Roku channel store as well as other API functionality is hosted either on AWS or through another service that resells AWS. I know a lot of the web site content is served by Rackspace, but I've noticed channel store issues in the past at the same time that Netflix was down.

[OddScott]

I'm going to speculate that some of the "other API functionality" includes NTP / time & date service. I had a channel mysteriously fail on Dec 24 and start working again on Dec 25. The channel uses signed time-expiring S3 URLs to get its feed file, and the only thing I can think of that would break it is if the player had a bogus date & time. S3 was not affected by the outage.

[TheEndless]

"OddScott" wrote:
I'm going to speculate that some of the "other API functionality" includes NTP / time & date service. I had a channel mysteriously fail on Dec 24 and start working again on Dec 25. The channel uses signed time-expiring S3 URLs to get its feed file, and the only thing I can think of that would break it is if the player had a bogus date & time. S3 was not affected by the outage.

Quite a few people claimed that the time was wrong on their Rokus. I had a similar issue with my Instant Watch Browser channel, which uses timestamped URLs when communicating with Netflix. Of course, the general Netflix outage was a bigger issue for me on that one.. 😛