Roku Developer Program

[EbioNathan]

Hi folks,

My employer is looking to distribute Roku's to our customers to view our in house health and fitness programs. However he is concerned that distributing Roku's will result in customers just watching Netflix or whatever, instead of the program we set up for them.
I have a basic channel set up for testing purposes and it's working well enough. However my boss would like to be able to load our channel on our hardware prior to distribution to our customers. Currently as far as I can see, set up of anything on the Roku device itself requires it to be linked to a Roku account which also requires a credit card.

So basically, is there anyway to pre-load a channel and is there any way to lock that channel into the top of the list or prevent the installation of other channels?

[sjb64]

I've actually wondered the same thing, would have use for that for another project.

[RokuJoel]

Well, technically if you buy the devices, unpack them, link them all to one account and add one channel, and set a PIN to prevent installing new channels, they will all come up with the same set of channels. Nothing will prevent a user from resetting the device and linking it to their own account and sitting on their couch watching Netflix...

- Joel

[sjb64]

That's what I assumed, and would work great.

Makes it a great device (the stick) to distribute for a app (financial, medical, etc. for example) that we don't want disassembled, reverse engineered, distributed, screen-shotted, or cut and pasted, and want to be able to disable via serial number for a subscription lapse. This would mean storing the SN of the device, but would be a very targeted private channel.