Roku Developer Program

[joetesta]

Hello -
I developed a private channel over a year ago and today a user contacted us to say he is not able to add the channel because he lives in Canada. I hadn't heard of this before and certain we have other users in Canada who never reported a problem, so I'm a bit puzzled.

I logged into our development account and edited the private channel and found there are geographic options on the "Channel Stores" line, where we had only "United States". I modified those to add all the options and saved (but did not publish) this channel. The "publish" option is currently gray (not green) and the user is still not able to add the channel. So I'm wondering if I need to increment the version number so that this geographic change can be published, or are those changes applied without re-publishing the package?

In the meanwhile, the user contacted roku support and reported back that he was told "private channels are not available in Canada". wth?

[RokuChris]

"joetesta" wrote:
So I'm wondering if I need to increment the version number so that this geographic change can be published, or are those changes applied without re-publishing the package?

You need to publish for the changes to take effect, but I don't think it's necessary to bump the version number. You should be able to just download and re-publish the existing pkg.

[joetesta]

Thanks RokuChris - I just published the same package and version with the new Channel Stores settings (all geographies selected) & we'll ask our user in Canada to try again now.

Out of curiosity, how does roku determine the geography - on its own using the ip address or is that something the user sets, or are the devices hard coded based on where they're sold or something? Did roku change something with this functionality recently? I'm just really surprised this never came up before since I know we have international users from several countries.