Roku Developer Program

[joetesta]

I saw some private channels offering pay-per-minute content and wondering how this is done. Does the roku app track how long the video player stays open? Or does the media server detect for how long streams are requested?
In the past I tried to generate reports showing how long users watched but wasn't able to get any kind of accurate measure, so I am really curious how they can do this with any accuracy.
tvmia,
Joe

[RokuJoel]

You could use msg.isplaybackposition() to tell how many seconds into a video the player has gone.

-Joel

[destruk]

The problem with that is if the user fast forwards, or rewinds to their favorite scene, it will misreport the time.
What you could do - increase the server traffic, set playback position notification to 1 second and every second (or another set minimum interval the roku would have to keep track of) have it send data to the server to indicate that second was actually played.

[destruk]

Of course if you are doing 'pay-per-minute' entertainment, you might also consider a subroutine that tracks how long a single frame has been 'paused' and still visible on the screen - or how much time spent looking through the bif file images - perhaps at a half-price discount per minute with a 1 minute minimum in that mode....

[TheEndless]

"destruk" wrote:
The problem with that is if the user fast forwards, or rewinds to their favorite scene, it will misreport the time.
What you could do - increase the server traffic, set playback position notification to 1 second and every second (or another set minimum interval the roku would have to keep track of) have it send data to the server to indicate that second was actually played.

I'd suggest using an roTimespan to track the seconds played. Fast forwards and rewinds trigger the isPaused event, so you could capture the total seconds on pause, and Mark() the timespan on isResumed/isStreamStarted. That should give pretty accurate viewing times.