Roku Direct Publisher

[Bigmike333]

Hello all,

I have developed a simple channel with the Direct Publishing template. My desire is to keep this channel private, so I haven't clicked on the Publish button yet. It is my understanding that there is no private channel support feature in Direct Publisher, so... My question is can I download a .pkg file from my personal Direct Publisher channels, thereby using it in the SDK which does support the private channels? Is there an easy way to do this? I want to be able to hand out the vanity code for the channel, but right now as pre-published, all I have is the temporary developer link.

Thanks!
Mike

[Baradanikto]

The Direct Publisher portal contains a page for Preview and Publish.  Mine states the following:

Device Preview
We recommend previewing your channel on your Roku box. You may also use the device preview to allow others to preview your channel before you publish.
Click the link below to add your channel to your account. To view the channel on a Roku device, or preview updates, refresh your device by going to Settings > System > System Update.

I've used the device preview to create a test (private) channel that I use to check for errors in my production channel.  The Device Preview provides a 'code' to allow for loading on the device without publishing.  Is there any reason why this would not work for you?

[Bigmike333]

Well, there are a couple of reasons I can think of. First, I can't hand out the vanity code for subscribers, but would have to resort to distributing a link. That's not the end of the world, but secondly, you can't get viewer statistics on the channel. It comes up all zeros. The stats are important to me. I have a super simple channel, but Roku says it must be developed with the SDK to be a private channel. So, I was hoping to strip the brs code, pkg, etc. from what I have.

Thanks for your reply.

[OddScott]

Even though there's not a vanity code, the automatically-generated preview code that Baradanikto mentioned functions the same way and doesn't need to be distributed as a link.

Viewer stats are all zeros for private/uncertified SDK channels too. But if you have an SDK channel you can add 3rd party stats like Google Analytics to track access. It's not quite as nice as getting the stats directly from Roku but it's better than nothing.

As I mentioned in response to another post, I would be very surprised if Roku provides the Direct Publisher channel source code. It probably contains calls to undocumented not-for-mere-mortal-use API functions or it could be written with the NDK instead of the SDK.