Building a Roku Channel Using Direct Publisher and NO CODING! (Now deprecated.)

**As of July 2023, The Direct Publisher Program has been sunsetted, and this tutorial will no longer be valid. See the official Roku announcement here: https://blog.roku.com/developer/rdp-s.... **

In this episode of 5 THINGS, Michael shows you how to create your very own Roku channel, and update it within minutes...with NO CODING!

1. What ways are there to create a Roku channel?
2. How do I use Direct Publisher?
3. What media do I need to create?
4. How do I update my channel?
5. What else do I need to know?

Complete transcript and walkthrough at http://5thingsseries.com/building-a-r...

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In today's mass media realm, there is competition for your attention. Getting your content out to as many viewers as possible is extremely difficult given the competitive landscape. But what about the massive untapped reach of Roku? Roku now has an easy way to create a channel with ZERO PROGRAMMING. You can be a novice/beginner and still create an OTT channel that streams your videos to users. In this episode of 5 THINGS, Michael Kammes shows you how to design and create your very own Roku channel and update it within minutes.

Direct Publisher can handle SD, HD, and UHD/4K videos for playback on your Roku 1, Roku 2, Roku 3, Roku 4, or the new stick. No need to develop against the Roku SDK, as this is all done through WordPress and the WP Smart TV plug-in.


Excerpt from the episode:

1. What ways are there to create a channel?

When I cut the cord a few years ago, I still needed to find a way to enjoy video media without simply relying on Netflix and YouTube. And buying many of the other subscription-based apps, like HBO GO, would simply jack up my monthly charge…which is why I canceled cable in the first place!

I looked at all of the OTT options out there, including AppleTV, FireTV, and various gaming consoles. Roku caught my eye as an inexpensive way to find and consume content, as it had thousands of public and private channels – many more than most others, and already a wide viewership. In fact, as of June this year, nearly 40 million Americans used their Roku at least once a month. It’s the #1 OTT platform out there. Roku has also just gone public, which means the company is going to accelerate even more quickly.

While I was thrilled with the amount of content I had easy access to with Roku, it wasn’t long before I wanted to get on the bandwagon and create my own channel for 5 THINGS.

The Roku channel paradigm is pretty simple. A channel is much like an EDL – it simply points to where the media is externally, and streams it when told to play, so channels are traditionally lightweight, as they only contain a few images, and code to link to your media elsewhere.

This seemed simple enough. However, when I started to create my own channel, there were only 2 ways to do it yourself.

First, was to use a site like instanttvchannel.com, which is a Cloud-Based Roku Channel Production System. Through a series of drop-downs and prompts, you could create your very own Roku channel. The problem I had was you had to pay per month as long as the channel was active, anywhere from $5 to $50 per month, and your account may have an InstantTV splash screen on launch, amongst other gotchas.

The second way was to develop against the Roku software development kit or SDK. Programming for a Roku channel is based around the BrightScript coding language, which is a bit like Javascript mixed with Visual Basic. Now, I could learn Brightscript and code from scratch, or, I could take some basic templates already configured for base levels of functionality and augment them as needed with modules of code.

So that’s what I did. It still relied on some coding and lots and lots of testing, and I spent a ton of time on forums and help guides. But it was the best choice since I wasn’t going to develop Roku channels full-time. It took about 100 hours of work, and the purchase of an old SD Roku model for testing on legacy gear to get my first channel up and running.

And then there were the updates.

Several hours per month, after each new episode, creating and testing versions for SD and HD Roku models.

But you fine folks are in luck. Last year, Roku introduced a 3rd way, known as “Direct Publisher”, which gave novice creators the ability to create a channel without writing a single line of code and have it work across almost any modern Roku player.

And thus, how to create a channel with Direct Publisher is what I’ll show you today.


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