Disappearing Categories?

Archived
1

On my channel I utilize fully the Categories functionality of Direct Publisher. Thus I have something like 15 or so categories defined which are correlated to my content via tags.

If you are familiar with Direct Publisher you probably understand what I am describing.

When I initially created the channel my categories appeared properly. But over time all of my specific categories have disappeared.

Does anyone else have this issue?

BTW, my categories are still properly defined in the Channel’s configuration. Just missing on the final product which is pushed out to viewers.

I do still have showing on my channel the “Recently Added” , “Most Popular” and “Highlighted” categories. Is Highlighted a default Roku DP category? I can’t remember. Neither here nor there since all my other 15 or so specific categories are missing.

Thanks for your observations. I appreciate your time.

2

Have you made sure to check the flag in the developer’s portal that indicates that your channel categories are defined in the feed file?

3

I had this problem with making an SDK channel. I had the categories, and then they worked for awhile when I tested. Yet then they disappeared on me after a week or so. Does anyone have any suggestions on what is going wrong?

4

This is the Direct Publisher forum, not SDK. But, that aside, did you fill in ‘tags’ in your feed to correlate and fill up the categories?

5

I tried to fill in ‘tags’ with the parenthesis and names, but how would you fill in a tag yourself?

6

Tags in your json feed file should look like this"

“tags”: [
“Bushcraft”
],
“genres”: [
“adventure”
]

7

Thank you. I forgot to have the genre. Another question, where do I put the weblink in the feed file for the categories?

8

I am going to assume your working with a json feed for a direct publisher channel!

Your feed can have several links such as:

Video to display content video

Thumbnail for video image

Trickplay  for video over 15 minutes!

Categories do not have a link!

Categories have two options

  1. Categories definded by the feed

Roku looks atr your feed and selects all “tag” elements and displays by tag, tag = category!

  1. Custom!

You must enter tags in custom and only custom categories will show!

You cannot use both options it’s one or the other!

example:

{
“id”: “1600457786150”,
“title”: “The Terminator 1”,
“shortDescription”: “The Terminator 1”,
“tags”: [
“The Joe Show”
],
“genres”: [
“special”
],
“content”: {
“dateAdded”: “2020-09-18T19:37:40+00:00”,
“duration”: 48,
“videos”: [
{
“url”: “http://51.158.101.1/621234562/ondemandtv/content/1600457786150.mp4”,
“quality”: “HD”,
“videoType”: “MP4”,
“bitrate”: 4000,
“filesize”: “29372458”
}
]
},
“author”: “On Demand TV Services”,
“thumbnail”: “http://51.158.101.1/634562/ondemandtv/content/1600457802.jpg”,
“releaseDate”: “2020-09-18”
},

9

By chance, would this be the same way to do it for a SDK channel?