Roku Developer Program

[yogamerge]

Hey guys,

Getting to close to finishing up my first channel. I am going to use Roku Billing and a subscription model. I want to have a free preview section in the channel, is that possible? When Roku sets up billing can they keep that section free and just prompt subscription signup in the other sections of the channel? or does the free preview section have to be it's own channel?

[Category5]

I believe what you want is to create two separate channels. One is a free, limited channel with in-channel upgrade option to the premium channel.

See section 6.4 of the docs:

http://sdkdocs.roku.com/display/sdkdoc/Channel+Packaging+And+Publishing#ChannelPackagingAndPublishin...

"6.4.3 Free channel to monthly or annual subscription channel
For example, a user adds a $0.00 channel, has limited access to content and is prompted within channel to buy for $2.99/month."

[RokuJoel]

Yes, you can have a free section in a pay channel, and it doesn't require you to have a free and paid channel. Note that if you want to target our Legacy devices, in-channel subscriptions are not supported. But for all our other devices, you can do this. Create your channel with the free content, and for the paid content, in order to watch it, when the user selects that content, you will use the roChannelStore component to check if the user has a valid subscription, and if not, you will trigger the purchase dialog, otherwise, you will allot the user to watch the content.

roChannelStore Info

Developer Blog article

Hope that helps. We encourage you to use inChannelPurchase and subscription as opposed to using the In-Place upgrade method described in the previous post.

- Joel