This is Louis and Char Magnifico from The Traveling Twosome (
www.TheTravelingTwosome.com). We have a Roku TV Channel, "The Traveling Twosome Channel." We are trying to incorporate our own commercials (preroll) into our videos and have built our channel based on the VideoPlayer template in the SDK. You can add our public channel via the Channel Store or at
https://owner.roku.com/add/thetravelingtwosomeIt has been recommended that we use VAST and Roku has sent me a VERY brief PDF about how to do so... however, it wasn't very verbose and we've run into a couple questions.
If VAST is what we need to do, then fine... but I'm not sure we need to do that. All we want to do is have a short commercial video played before whatever video is selected to be played. I don't want to have to repackage or republish every time we acquire a new commercial ad. I'd like to just be able to update an XML file (ideally, the same XML file that calls the video being selected if that's possible). We'd like to be able to choose what ad is played before what content.
For example, let's say we've got a video where Char is in the Wonder Woman costume wrestling Louis in the ring. There is a costume company in Los Angeles that has a commercial... a great video for them to run their commercial on would be the one where we are wrestling each other where the Wonder Woman costume is being worn. So I'd like to be able to just put it there before that video. Likewise, the Hot Springs Tourism Commission would likely want to run a commercial on our TV Show episode, "A Day in the Life of Hot Springs."
If we could get away with this without running off of an ad server or having to use VAST but rather just hosting the commercials on the same server that the channel's videos are on and do a simple edit to VideoPlayer to make this happen, that would be ideal. We'd just have two requirements:
1) the commercial video couldn't be skipped prior to playing the main video
and
2) the main video would play right after the commercial is over.
Sounds easy, right? I can't find documentation ANYWHERE to tell me how to do this.
If any of you can help, we'd REALLY APPRECIATE IT! If you had something to promote, perhaps we could even put you on our radio show as a guest to promote it in exchange for helping us on this matter. At the very least, we could send you a free autographed copy of our new book.
Thanks - let us know if you can help.
Louis and Char Magnifico
The Traveling Twosome
www.TheTravelingTwosome.com