Channel published this morning at 10am. Direct publisher shows no errors, 81 files ingested.
The channel on roku device is empty and contains no programs. This is super sketch. Waited two days to see this. Apparently we have to develop channels in the published state because when unpublished they appear in the same state - empty with no programs.
This also happened to me with one of my unpublished channels. Partner Success told me there was a bug and they didn’t know when it would be fixed.
One thing I have tried in the past is to prepare it for publication with a distant date. At some point that may force them to fix “the bug” since they don’t want to publish a barren channel. I seemed to have success with this strategy, but there is no way to tell if Roku fixed it in the publication process or if the bug got worked out on its own.
Yeah… That’s all I’m getting here… Is that Direct Publisher is a hot mess…
How many years have they been running this platform? Their engineers are clever enough to create their own language to write channels in, yet, don’t think their platform all the way through and give Direct Publisher users so much as a log file or any meaningful error messages so we can debug why our channels don’t work.
But, if - with the luck of the gods behind you - you do get a channel running (no thanks to the completely non-existent Partner Success or whatever Orwellian name they go by), and you are successful - they take 30% of your ad inventory - it’s the biz model minus functional developer support.