Roku Developer Program

[EnTerr]

"RokuJoel" wrote:
I doubt our partners (including the developers on this forum) would like people to be able to data mine what their customers are watching on our platform - they could use it to compete against you.

Be more specific, RokuJoel - who are you replying to?
I doubt you meant my proposal, since i already addressed that: REP-NB1 asks for coarse granularity: at channel# level only. Like i said, DirecTV allows much more and they have by a magnitude (5-10x) more customers than Roku has and accordingly are threading with more concern.

I guess you were addressing RoomieRemote but that is somewhat irrelevant since because of the content variability and custom interfaces RokuCo do not have the technical ability to peek such fine-grained info over channel's shoulder.

We can however open a new topic and discuss how finer, more detailed information can be shared by individual channels, if they choose to do so. Say by listening on particular port and following common protocol so remote agents don't have to re-implement that per channel.

[RoomieRemote]

If you're seriously concerned about esoteric things like data mining, just do what every other set top company does and put a license agreement in front of ECP 2.0. You don't want to stifle ECP features for 3 years straight now because of edge concerns like that which can be easily mitigated by separating good developers from bad and making clear the allowed uses of the API. For our app and I suspect most of the other app developers here, we can barely even understand what you're concerned about and meanwhile it's mystifying that Roku is allowing this area to fall so far behind.

Take it from the perspective of the user, take it away from these nits. What does the user want? They want to use their Roku box to play content while on their iPad/iPhone, they can see things like how far into the program they are, browse other content, etc. The list of things that *should* be happening here is long and we can debate the finer points of XSS or data mining for the next few years or we can just implement what is needed and make developers sign agreements around usage. It's not like there are a million developers who need this. There are at most 10-20 apps of relevance to be very generous. You get 25 agreements and problem solved, 2 years of worrying about edge issues saved. Those developers get API keys would be a typical system in use by many others.

Specifically with regards to last post's comment "since because of the content variability and custom interfaces RokuCo do not have the technical ability" – part of the point is that it is incumbent upon Roku to provide the top level interface for doing this. Yes, supporting a particular app's metadata like Amazon or Netflix may require some level of custom metadata, but the overriding architectural mantra is that only Roku is in a position to consolidate the interface to this at the API level.

Thank you.

[EnTerr]

Shoo, RoomieRemote - shoo away!

Please don't hijack this thread with your "tear it down completely and build something completely new" ideas. Go and make another thread - i will gladly join and participate there; i've had some musings on deeper integration. Maybe we (you, them, etc) can build completely new protocol one day, in a year or two. But not in this thread, please. Read whatever i proposed and make comments only on that. I propose something so simple that if given go ahead can be available within a month.

If you think it is not useful as-is, that's fine - i'll survive. But i don't want to discuss complete re-make in this very thread, please respect that.

[EnTerr]

Ok, so how do we continue further with this proposal, Roku* ?
What's next: are there technical details to hone or do we push for "yay or nay" by the product manager?

[RokuJoel]

There is something in the works, if we don't announce something within the next 3 months, then bump this thread, otherwise, please let it go for now.

- Joel

[angryllama]

I registered just to vote for this feature. I don't care exactly how it works, but I would be extremely happy with some way to query for metadata regarding the current channel and hopefully some channel-specific data for the major channels. My use case is quite simple:

I have a VFD (Vacuum Florescent Display) connected to an embedded system which is mounted in my entertainment center. I'd like to display the current channel as well as the title, elapsed time, and total time, if available. Of course other metadata would be nice. (Think Roku SoundBridge display, but I don't care about the spectrum analyzer)

I'm thinking that some hook could be added to the brightscript API for fetching key-value pairs of metadata. I don't even care if the key names are standardized across channels. The REST API *could* return the data for all active brightscript contexts -- eliminating the problem with e.g screensavers.

GET /query/status

{
  1 : {
    title: "Citizen Kane",
    elapsed_time: 3411,
    total_time: 10000,
    genre: "Poop",
    /* ... */
  }, 123 : {
    /* metadata for channel 123 */
  }
}

Hell, I don't care how it is represented. I just want to be able to display meaningful status on my remote device! Thanks guys.

[EnTerr]

"RokuJoel" wrote:
There is something in the works, if we don't announce something within the next 3 months, then bump this thread

Bump, Roku*.
Are we making progress on this one?
If it is not ready yet, how will it work like? Let's work together on nailing down the API

[EnTerr]

Four months ago i did estimate how many remote-app installations will benefit from implementing the feature requested here. Based on the independent developers showing their interest/support in this thread, that number was at 200,000+.

Is this number not significant enough for RokuCo to be bothered collaborating with us?

[EnTerr]

Roku* -
any progress on this one?

[RokuJoel]

Hi,

We have a policy of not talking about what may or may not be in development.

If and when something has been implemented, tested and passed our internal approval process, we will notify you. All the right people are aware of your request and this thread, so please be assured this request has not fallen off the radar.

- Joel