Roku Direct Publisher

[DevOps]

Was anyone ever notified of the Roku blackout?

We went through a lot of work to update our channel and fix some major issues and then after repeated attempts to push the updates, nothing was being pushed live. Then we discovered that apparently there is a blackout per this blog post: https://blog.roku.com/developer/2019-channel-store-blackout-dates

This seems like a very major update that Roku should have emailed the entire developer community as opposed to writing an update, especially when the blackout is for close to an entire month.

I'm not the one to complain a lot, but what I have come to learn from working and building on Roku is that this company doesn't give a **bleep** about the developer community. They just care about the major conglomerate media companies/apps (i.e. Disney, Hulu, Fox, etc). When I look at the questions and answers on these forums, there is close to zero support from the Roku dev team. Either they don't know WTF they're doing, or they just don't give a **bleep** - either one is not a good look.

Did anyone experience this blackout issue last year? And does it only affect channel dev/design update? In other words, can continue to add/remove content via JSON feed during blackout?

[37mediagroup]

Thanks for posting this. I was going to as well as I just saw this on Friday after I emailed Partner Success, hadn't heard back but happened to be in the regular Developer forum & saw someone posted about it. I searched my email, and it does seem an email went into my gmail 'Promotions' (spam-lite) folder, hint: search your email for 'blackout'. Subject titles were not very attention grabbing however, just 'Recent Updates' and 'Roku 9.2 Platform Changes' or something.

They DEFINITELY should have posted a sticky in the forums for this. I recall 'blackouts' in past years, but I thought it was only for new submissions, not changes, although myb I'm wrong on that, I hadn't made any changes at those times tho. Regardless, it warrants a sticky. 

Also upsetting, I made my change on Wednesday, prior to the Friday cutoff, but the blog post seems to say they will make as many changes as they can get to, but doesn't even seem to confirm all. 

Having said that, I did make a change to my json feed Saturday & it seemed to take, however I made 1 more tweak yesterday, hadn't updated as of this morning, I'll follow up tonight or tomorrow. I believe if you make the change to the same json feed/url it should re-cache over time, but you couldn't give a new json url. 

[Jourdy288]

I just searched for "Blackout" in my inbox, and yeah, they did notify me last month. Title of the e-mail? "Roku OS 9.2 release notes, Fall 2019 certification update, and more!"

Not nearly as helpful as, I don't know, "Important Notice- you won't be able to update your channel for nearly a month. What a mess.