Roku Developer Program

[jalmberg]

My company has a client who currently streams large (1-3 hr) videos from S3/Cloudfront, through their own website hosted on EC2 (Amazon Web Services). We set up and built their entire system. They now wish to distribute these videos through a Roku channel and have asked me to give an estimate for development time.

I lead a small but experienced professional development team with quite a bit of video knowledge. We've done web (Perl/PHP/Ruby/Rails) and iOS apps (Objective C), but have no experience with the Roku environment or Brightscript, so we'd need to learn that from scratch.

We've read the development docs and have made a preliminary estimate, but I'd love to hear from a few people who have actually created a channel and have discovered the hidden pitfalls that tend to blow out 'preliminary estimates'!

So my question to developers who have actually launched a channel: given our experience level, how much development time should we budget for launching a basic channel, that allows subscribers to select videos and play them?

Of course, I'm just looking for a rough but conservative estimate, here.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Brgds: John

[jbrave]

Well my first channel took 3 months to develop, working on it with as little sleep as I could get away with 7 days a week. I could now write a channel that does what you describe in a few days. Since you have experience with other languages, let's say conservative estimate for first time developer would be 30 working days if that is all you are doing, add two weeks to that and there's your estimate if you devote all working hours in that period to the project.

Or, hire a roku developer (like me) to do it for you.

What you need to figure out:

1. Get list of videos from server in XML format
2. Parse that and store in an array
3. Create a posterscreen
4. Load array into posterscreen
5. Handle user input to posterscreen
6. Display info in a springboard screen
7. Load a video from the array into the videoplayer
8. Handle end of video condition

So that is a roadmap of 8 functions to build, function 1 calls 2, 2 calls 3, etc.

[jalmberg]

Thanks, that jives with our internal estimate... we also estimated 3 months.

Please shoot me an email re outsourcing it to you: jalmberg@identry.com

Thanks: John

[destruk]

Depends on what you want it to do, how you want to do it, and the state of the content you will be using, as well as your "'team's'" work ethic.
My first channel took me 3 weeks, but I have extensive programming background in C++, Visual Basic, Pascal, Fortran, GWBasic, etc etc dating back to the original timex sinclair.
Once you do the first one, using some components, future channels using those same features become a lot easier to create. So - if you asked someone who already did a poster screen type channel to do one, they could knock out the basic screens in a channel for you within a couple days to a couple weeks depending on what you wanted.
If your media content needs to be reencoded and databased, that could take a person 3-6 months to get all of it done, even on a current top-end computer.
And if you want to charge for your channel, account for extra testing time of your billing code, server setup, etc etc, or let ROKU handle that part.
As for me, I am under contract full time for a company already, so I can't take on other side projects.

[jbrave]

Sent you an email.

- Joel