Roku Developer Program

[jbickmore]

hey everybody!

i wanted to ask what approaches people have taken to log video plays and gather metrics from their roku apps.

obviously, in some sense you could monitor the request for the video files on the server side. however, i was hoping there might be a way in brightscript that i could record when people selected to play a video, and ideally send this information to the server. i realize BrightScript by its nature is pretty sandboxed, and looking at the API i didn't see any obvious way of making HTTP/network calls to log this type of information...

does anybody have any suggestions? thanks in advance for your help...

[Anonymous]

Hi there,

At the very end of the "RokuDvp-ComponentReference.pdf" documentation in the SDK si the documentation for roUrlTransfer. You can use this to do HTTP GET and POST if you want to send data back to your server.

[jbickmore]

Thanks, I think that will do the trick.

[BrianD]

Or you could take a different approach.

If you use a service such as Libsyn to host your video files, they keep track of stats for you. Everytime the video is called, their servers increment the count.

You could also use a service such as Podtrac. Yes they are for helping you place ads in your video content however they have a metric system based off of URLs. Podtrac and Libsyn's stats seem to be the "standards." Especially for audio and/or video shows distributed via the Internet.