Roku Developer Program

[cocotower]

What on Earth has happened, Roku?  I operate 6 channels with different content.  Recently when I'm testing the Subscriptions between my in-channel product channels, I get a dialog saying "You're Currently Subscribed On Another Channel.  Please visit roku.com and unsubscribe from <said channel>".

Please tell me this is just for Test Users??? If not, I'm literally about to have a heart attack.  Why doesn't the warning dialog make it clear this is just for Test Users?

I need a reply, guys.  Why do my posts which are serious always go ignored?  I'm also beta testing for you guys with my own valuable time and all I get is no answers, ever, when it comes to me wanting help.

[cocotower]

Sadly, I find myself talking to myself on the forums yet again.

Ok, I've done the homework for "you guys" (me) and found the answer to the multi-channel in-channel products mystery.  Product Groups.

For each channel, you need to create a different group. I named my groups the same as my channels. Why Roku can't do this automatically is beyond me.  In fact, why can't each channel's products just stay in their own group as they were before.  Anyhow, it seems at the current moment that utilizing the Product Groups allows me and hopefully the end customer to purchase/subscribe to products in any channel I develop for a third party or company, as they were able to do in the past.

If you didn't get the memo about Product Groups or haven't uploaded a newer package for your channel(s) lately you'll probably fall victim to this channel-breaking decision by Roku.  The scariest part about Roku is that they can and will break your whole business or operation with a few lines of their SDK code, so BE ON EDGE daily.  I'm not trying to be an ass, just being brutally honest.  Stay Alert and never take it for granted that your channels will keep working.

Now while I'm typing in this message Roku has signed me out for security reasons and I have to prove I'm not a robot again just in 2 minutes time of typing this message.

[sanity-check]

I don't know if everyone else does this, but I'd suggest a totally separate Roku account for each channel if they're for third parties. All channels signed with the same dev key share a registry which can cause problems on the devices, and the payment API stuff is similar in that everything goes through a single web service - not ideal if one has separate environments for different tenants. 

[cocotower]

If each account requires its own Roku device, I can only imagine how expensive and difficult to develop for.  But ideally you'd want to be able to hand off or sell the account without affecting your others.  Now, since Roku allows a developer to make numerous channels for himself you could prefix your product IDs with unique names per channel so there's no conflict in the registry.

[sanity-check · Accepted solution]

Unless you have really a lot (30+?) of channels and they all get regular updates it's not a vast amount of hassle. The only thing you need a device attached to a specific account for is local purchase testing, and once that works it doesn't usually need debugging again very often. I've got about 10 Roku's here, and sometimes it's quicker to just factory reset the nearest one than remember which box is signed into what account.

Sharing registries can be mitigated with prefixes, sure - but sometimes a client wants me to use some terrible 3rd-party library which pretty much eats up the entire registry allocation.. And obviously then there's data leakage between channels if it's not also prefixing registry entries (which it isn't).

At least Roku devices are small and cheap. A couple of times a year an app will fail Samsung's QA on some particular model for no clear reason - what's the answer? Ebay, and a house full of bloody televisions in boxes.