Roku Developer Program

[destruk]

First, how many top level channels can one entity have? Take for example - Mediafly. They have Mediafly Gaming which has 10 items inside, mediafly music which has 17, mediafly sports, and the basic mediafly online category that all show up as separate channels. What would happen if NBC was to approach Roku and tell you guys it wants a top level domain channel for Law & Order, and one for Law & Order Special Victims Unit, another one for Law & Order Criminal Intent, one for Law & Order Trial by Jury, and one for Law & Order Los Angeles. And then if they wanted a Saturday Night Live Channel on top of all that, as it's own top level heading? Would you tell them they're limited to a single top level channel choice called "NBC" or would you prefer them to have one channel for all the Law & Order series and one for SNL?

It's called competing for the casual browser user - they will scroll through channels and if you get 4 separate hits it could take away market share for someone who has a single channel name with three or four subcategories within it. Eventually you run the risk of someone having a single channel for each individual episode and the main browse menu could become unusable.

Now of course this is all fine and good right now - with fewer than ~50 public channels listed, but in the future it will become a real mess esepcially if a single entity is allowed to have 20 separate icons for their limited content. So, are there plans for eliminating channels in the future? Like if you notice a channel has only a single subscriber/user will the channel be removed? What if nobody subscribes to a channel - does it die after a month?

[kbenson]

This isn't the app store, and Roku doesn't seem to enforce any specific guidelines for public channels beyond that they need to not infringe on others rights, do not feature pornography and don't do anything else obviously illegal. Publishing public channels is not immediate though, as Roku does review them for the prior mentioned compliance. I suspect Roku would strongly suggest any company acting as you described please act more responsible. Then again, if the channels for additional shows actually feature specialized content and specific code for that show, who's to say the publisher shouldn't be able to put out lots of channels specific to each show?

As the number of channels grows, the mechanism for finding , reviewing and installing channels will necessarily need to get more complex to better deal with the large number of channels. Until then, I think it's not really an issue.

As for methods to remove unused channels from the store, I don't think automatic removal of channels base don subscriber rate is appropriate. There may be future users that DO find it interesting, and it's completely unfair to the developer. If the platform is successful, it WILL get crowed in the channel store. Arbitrary removal of channels would at best only temporarily alleviate the problem, but could definitely alienate developers.