Roku Developer Program

[jnicholas]

I have a channel in the works that will have live programming only part time. Does anyone have examples of best practices for that kind of scenario? I'm unsure the best way to handle notifying a viewer that a live event is now on and for handling when the live event is over. On the web and mobile side I can use push techniques like web sockets to handle the message and it's more obvious there how to handle a pop up message or just go straight to the live stream. On the roku it seems like I'm limited to polling for the message but it seems a little odd to have a tile appear or disappear.

[RokuJoel]

The simplest thing you can do is just pop a notice when playback fails that "Sorry, no live stream is available right now".

You could probably use roStreamSockets to integrate with whatever mechanism you are using for the web, or you could store a schedule online for your live stream in XML or JSON format on your server, and have the player load that at startup, check if "now" falls within one of those times, and display a message if it doesn't, otherwise, play.

- Joel