Roku Direct Publisher

[a_tamalonis]

I set a validityPeriodStart value for my videos and I have observed a potential bug. The videos are added to my feed the night before with a start time of 11am UTC or 6am Central Time as in this example:

          "validityPeriodStart":"2021-10-26T11:00:00+00:00"

In the morning the video thumbnail is visible on my channel, but clicking on the video shows a blank screen. No loading bar is shown. I tested the video file with the Stream Tester and the video playback was fine. I observed that at exactly 11am local time (Chicago), the video would play in my channel instead of showing the blank screen.

The video should be available as of 6am local time, but instead is available 11am local time. Am I using the ISO8601 datetime format incorrectly?

Even if this were expected behavior, I don't understand why the video would be visible in my channel before the validityPeriodStart datetime. And even if that were expected behavior, the user experience is confusing with the channel showing a blank screen and no message explaining that the video is not yet available.

I can play with reformatting the datetime, but it appears to me that Direct Publisher is not correctly interpreting the timezone of the datetime. Thanks

[a_tamalonis]

I changed my timestamp from "+00:00" to "Z" and it appears to be working.

          "validityPeriodStart":"2021-11-01T11:00:00Z"

I'll note that both formats are included in ISO 8601 and the example documentation uses "+00:00" https://developer.roku.com/docs/specs/direct-publisher-feed-specs/json-dp-spec.md#content

I experienced this with multiple videos, and the first video tested with "Z" plays fine as of 10:50am local time (Central) 11/1. With the "+00:00" format I would have expected it to not play until 11am local time as described previously.