Hi,
We have a free AVOD channel which we have been publishing for a couple years now.
With the changes earlier this month to pass automated Certification Testing before publishing we can no longer publish updates to our channel.
We are a free video streaming channel but do require the user to activate using a rendezvous screen. Because of this we fail the Deep Linking and Play Performance tests.
How can we work around this and publish out latest version? We are not SVOD so those rules don't apply.
Thank you for your help!
Claire
Hi eclaires,
To be clear, the deep linking and performance requirements do apply to free and AVOD channels. However, you are correct that our automated Certification Testing tool is not yet equipped to run these tests properly on a channel that has an intermediary login screen such as the one you're describing here.
With that in mind, our Partner Success team is aware of this shortcoming and is available to grant exemptions to these testing requirements on a case-by-case basis. Please go ahead and contact them via our web contact form, and they'll help launch your channel — https://developer.roku.com/contact
Note that we are constantly improving our certification automation tooling, and may introduce updates in the future that enable testing on a channel like yours from within the Developer Dashboard in the future. So do be sure you're still meeting our deep linking and performance requirements!
If somebody would kindly describe these unknown acryonyms like SVOD, AVOD, TVOD, etc... I might can help with the deep-linking. For my channels I grab the arguments from main.brs and store them in global variables.
I'm not even sure what a rendezvous screen is, but once you get the input you need from there, or if no info is required after seeing that the user is already registered, check to see if the channel was called via deep-link using the global variable(s) and continue on the same path you normally would for deep-linking. I think even if you don't do it properly the certification process will see the deep-linking usage in your code and certify anyway?
This you probably already know, but upload your package as a new channel for testing only, using a different name like "My Channel TEST" so you won't get them mixed up when Roku sends it to your TV. Run it through the regular Roku analysis routines to see if it certifies. Only when my test channel runs perfect do I upload the same package to my original channel and re-pepublish. I also ignore the certification "Warnings" as they don't prevent from being certified.
sub Setup(args as Dynamic) as Void
m.global = m.screen.getGlobalNode()
m.global.id = "GlobalNode"
if args.contentID <> invalid AND args.mediaType <> invalid
m.global.addFields( {contentDLId: args.contentID} )
m.global.addFields( {mediaDPType: args.mediaType} )
m.global.addFields( {deepLinkingLand: true} )
else
m.global.addFields( {deepLinkingLand: false} )
end if
Hi eclaires,
To be clear, the deep linking and performance requirements do apply to free and AVOD channels. However, you are correct that our automated Certification Testing tool is not yet equipped to run these tests properly on a channel that has an intermediary login screen such as the one you're describing here.
With that in mind, our Partner Success team is aware of this shortcoming and is available to grant exemptions to these testing requirements on a case-by-case basis. Please go ahead and contact them via our web contact form, and they'll help launch your channel — https://developer.roku.com/contact
Note that we are constantly improving our certification automation tooling, and may introduce updates in the future that enable testing on a channel like yours from within the Developer Dashboard in the future. So do be sure you're still meeting our deep linking and performance requirements!