Roku Developer Program

[Burkhardi]

"campbellwang" wrote:
Yes I actually do agree with you. The only problem from my prospective is that we have spent a lot of time and more money creating our channel. Who is going to give us that back?

Just an idea, you may say “mehâ€

[KennyJ]

Donations often work well. I know he has a huge audience, but Leo Laporte recently said the only salary he was going to take from TWiT this year was from listener donations.

[campbellwang]

Burkhardi,

Why would I say “mehâ€

[Burkhardi]

"campbellwang" wrote:
Burkhardi,

Why would I say “mehâ€

[flaminio]

"TVforEveryone" wrote:
I totally agree. As a content creator, we don't want to reinvent the wheel. We simply need to "repurpose" the video into a Roku friendly form.

This is where I'm at. I'm on Tivo, just finished up an app for Boxee, and considering Roku. I'm interested in creating content once and getting the widest possible platform distribution.

I'm not a programmer, however. I can just hack my way through things with very basic knowledge and some good examples.

I would like to buy a Roku box and develop an app, but not sure if I'll be able to pull it off. I'm looking around here but is there support available (Roku or user) for really stupid questions? I skimmed the documentation, but I'm uncertain how much time to invest here.

Like, can I pull video content from an RSS feed? Is it possible to pull directly from YouTube like Boxee or does it need to be hosted file like Tivo? (at least I don't think Tivo can pull from YouTube! hmmm...)

[rsg]

Interesting development by Apple and iphone apps as it relates to this topic and templates for apps in order to encourage rapid development. The new sdk has a template approach built in. Here is a review http://www.forbes.com/2010/03/08/softwa ... phone.html

[cripy]

The basic channel is enough to get any real developer in the right direction.

I too work for a large content provider. I received my Roku just a few days ago and by the time the weekend was over I already had a Private Channel uploaded with many 'added features'. Within this timeframe I was able to:

* add resume support (with % watched. i.e. [resume 20% watched])
* add option for watching a separate trailer link of the movie (not the first 2 mins)
* added account linking support
* skinned my channel.
* created necessary XML feeds and .bif files
* added HD branding for HD videos

In my opinion they provide more than enough documentation and the videoplayer sample application is _perfect_ to get started. Don't get me wrong -- Roku can be a daunting task to jump into. (but you don't need a "team" of developers" like stated above). There aren't many tutorials for Roku and it's more of a self-learning experience. I suggest lots of forum searching. (I've found quite a lot of information regarding different techniques and methods already answered here on the forums)

[cripy]

One thing I can add though is that as a developer and user of Roku I went from "super excited" to begin developing for it to more of a "questionable" stance. I work for a content provider who has made the switch to H264/mp4 for awhile now. However, once I started trying to "look around" for possibly other channels to create I started to realize how truly limited the Roku is to it's competitors. In the end of the day they need to support more video formats or they are going to get crushed by their competitors.

From the way I see it -- Roku's current model involves content creators to format their video to "Roku specification" --where-as the competitors are actually taking the opposite approach and making it a "play anything you throw at it" deal.

The fact that Boxee is going to support FLV over HTTP _AND_ RTMP is a deal breaker.

Granted, this device doesn't exist yet -- but once it does Roku is either going to have to step up it's game or move over.

I literally went from "Wow, Roku is so awesome. Super cheap, everyone can afford it-- perfect for the market" to "Oh they only support Mp4 and WMV...okay cool...not too much of a big deal" to ... "WOW THEY ONLY SUPPORT WMV AND MP4?!?!?!? Have they seen all the content on the web?"

Roku needs to adjust their business logic and adjust it now. Nobody in their right mind is going to adjust their content _for_ the Roku when there is much better competition which doesn't require these "adjustments"

[nowhereman]

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with anyone, but I wanted to point out that I was able to take the video player example and turn it into a podcast client with just a few hours of effort. I changed fewer than a dozen lines of code in the channel itself. The audio player example was equally helpful when I wanted to play an internet radio station on the box. I'm sure there are improvements that could be made, but I have found the example code provided with the SDK to be a valuable jumping off point for my development projects.

[KennyJ]

I think you're right Cripy (about the need for additional video support), but Roku is the best box on the market right now, IMO. They support 3 large video content providers (Netflix, Amazon, MLB) and some other well known providers (Flickr, Pandora) and they charge as low as $80. No one can touch them right now in what they bring for the cost. Even when the Boxee box comes out, it's $200 and only support HDMI output which means that about 60% of households couldn't even use it right now.

I can bet you that Roku is working on additional video support as we speak. As far as I know, we still don't even have a release date for Boxee and you still can't preorder it, so they have time. 🙂