Roku Developer Program

[casolorz]

I have a private channel I'm testing with my app users, it will be private while my app is in beta release. My users in Mexico are unable to install the channel but other international users haven't had an issue. Is this normal?

Thanks. 

[speechles]

Early on with apps all of these did not exist. Now that they do, it is up to the developer to occasionally log into their apps, adjust accordingly as new fields appear here for each country. I suspect you may have missed some of these if you developed your app quite some time ago. Italy, France, and Mexico were added about the same time back in 2017.

[casolorz]

I actually created my channel last week so I already had all those options.

I think because of their legal troubles in Mexico, Roku might have disabled private channels. I created a México account with a VPN and reset my roku to it and couldn't install the channel either.

[speechles]

In addition, we may be adversely impacted if copyright holders assert claims, or commence litigation, alleging copyright infringement against the developers of channels that are distributed on our platform. While our platform policies prohibit streaming content on our platform without distribution rights from the copyright holder, and we maintain processes and systems for the reporting and removal of infringing content, in certain instances our platform has been misused by unaffiliated third parties to unlawfully distribute copyrighted content. For example, we are involved in litigation in Mexico that was commenced by a large Mexican pay TV and Internet access provider. This case principally targeted entities that are alleged to sell unlicensed content to consumers using our platform, among other means. At the commencement of this case, a court issued a temporary ban on the importation and sale of Roku devices in Mexico, which remains in effect. In the three months ended June 30, 2017, we recorded a charge of $1.0 million for a write-down of inventory on hand and on order and a charge of $0.7 million for sales incentives to sell inventory in other sales channels, each due to the Mexico sales ban. Our involvement in this litigation, or similar legal matters in the future, could cause us to incur significant legal expenses and other costs, and be disruptive to our business.

Found this tidbit in Roku SEC filings. They are a public company so some things have to be told. It doesn't mention what actions further were taken, but it does say "in the future" and "disruptive to our business" so you are likely correct in your assumption.

full disclosure: https://ir.roku.com/node/6671/html

[casolorz]

Yeah, it was based on those news that I got my theory that they banned them. One of the users I was working with said he tried to install private channels that worked before and they don't work anymore.

[speechles]

... and this is why we cannot have nice things... I think roku is like a bag of oranges in mexico. One bad moldy orange, they throw the entire bag of oranges away. Not being racist. I've seen mexicans selling oranges so the analogy holds. As a company roku is akin to this bag of oranges. In mexican economy a bag of oranges with any spoiled must be discarded. In this way Mexico has discarded roku as spoiled. Tainted. It is up to Roku to clean up that image and show effort of change. I suspect eventually the rest of the world will reward the players which play nice with copyright. Roku is on the road to recovery. Eventually, perhaps what damage was done can be repaired? I suspect it is roku with-holding support for private channels in Mexico for fear of more lawsuits and damaging the brand further. It is a slipperly slope we are on.

[newchannel]

Forgive me for chiming in on the thread. I don't have any useful information to offer but I have a question about making channels available outside of the US. I've been wondering if there is information on what other countries are best to submit to. I've only submitted of course to US and added Canada.

Thank you.

[casolorz]

I have no idea but the configuration page has a list of countries and a rest of the world option. I'm guessing some companies have reasons to not target the whole world but if you don't then probably just select all of those.

[newchannel]

"casolorz" wrote:
I have no idea but the configuration page has a list of countries and a rest of the world option. I'm guessing some companies have reasons to not target the whole world but if you don't then probably just select all of those.

Okay, thank you. I'm looking into using cloudfront to see how that works with aws to reach other countries. Apparently, cloudfront makes a copy of the files and places it in the region a person wants to broadcast the files to and I guess it speeds up the process for videos to play smoothly by saving download time to those regions. At least that is what I understand about cloudfront. 

[casolorz]

I use cloudfront for other stuff and it works pretty well.