#brightscript

Premium development partners like Netflix get access to Roku’s OpenGL ES 2.0 API which allows for a much more specialized look with custom functionalities that are not offered to the common developer (me). 

The OpenGL ES 2.0 API is currently only available under NDA to selected premium development partners. Roku desires to more openly share these low level APIs. We are hard at work tackling the security issues with this sharing that will simultaneously give content owners good reason to trust the uncompromising security of the box.

I’ve signed up for a Roku developer account: https://www.roku.com/developer

and an account on their forum site: http://forums.roku.com/

and booked marked the Roku Developer Blog: https://blog.roku.com/developer/ 

and downloaded the Roku SDK and example apps: http://wwwimg.roku.com/static/sdk/RokuSDK.zip

I forked Put.io’s Roku player from GitHub to review and deconstruct because I am familiar with the channel and because it interacts with an API (Put.io’s).

Lacy McDowell’s Instructables post was very useful in showing the basic steps to a channel’s creation and local dev deployment to my Roku. I didn’t follow all of his steps since I was only interested in the high level process at this point but I was able to modify and deploy Roku’s example video player app successfully and see the changes deployed and working on my device. I did the same with the Put.io app as well.

The official Roku Developer guide also has an installation walk-through.