Create Roku Search feed 2.0 (JSON) in ViewLift

Learn how to integrate your ViewLift - Roku app into Roku Search feed 2.0.

About Roku Search feed

Roku is a popular streaming platform that allows users to watch movies, TV shows, and other content on their TVs. In order for your content to be discoverable on Roku, you need to enable Roku search — the typical search feature that allows people to search for content on Roku devices.

When your channel is enabled for search, people who are looking for specific content on Roku, such as a new release film, will be able to find your channel in the search results. This means that even if people don't know about your channel yet, they will still be able to find your content.

Enabling Roku Search integration

1. Feed Management

• To enable Roku Search, navigate to the Admin section of your Viewlift Tools account. You must have an Admin account to access this section.
• Click Feed Management where you can create a feed for Roku search integration.

2. Generating the Feed

• In the ADD NEW FEED dialog, select Roku 2.0 as the target platform for the feed. Enter the Name and Description for the content feed. Tags and Categories are optional. Tags can limit the search results to content items that have those tags. Therefore, it is recommended to avoid entering tags unless you have a specific reason to do so. For example, if you have partnered with Tata Sky and want to exclude certain content from your Tata Sky feed, you might want to create a tag such as "skip_tata" and apply it on the content-level page and here.
• Once the feed is generated, the URL is generated under the Roku2 URL field which is hosted in your S3 bucket.

3. Submit the search feed on Roku

• Copy the link and use a JSON format validator to verify that your feed is using properly formatted JSON. 
• Use Roku’s search feed validator in the Developer Dashboard to verify that your feed adheres to Roku’s search feed schema and includes all the required metadata.
• Add the feed URL and email address in the Search feed validator page and then submit your feed. In approximately 15 minutes, Roku begins validating your feed.

The UI now displays the status of your search feed, including the percentage of content that has been ingested; the time the feed was last ingested; and whether the feed has been validated, published, or failed. Roku will generate a feed ingestion report that tells you the number of entries in the feed that has passed/failed validation. To learn more, see this Roku article, Submit search feeds with new self-serve workflow.

Troubleshooting - Content is not appearing in search results

If your content is not showing up in search, there are a few things you can do:

• Check to make sure that the content is included in the feed. You can identify missing content by performing a search on your Roku device.
• Verify that the content IDs, images, and other metadata are being properly populated in the catalog. For more information, see this Roku article: Implementing Roku Search. Remove any tags and categories filter. 
• In the event of unsuccessful validation, contact Roku Partner Success and provide them with details about your feed and channel.

Here's an example of a content ID and its metadata.

{
        "id": "31b6a7a2-9ccb-1da3-bca5-1234b56d78b3",
        "type": "series",
        "titles": [
          {
            "value": "DR. G: MEDICAL EXAMINER",
            "language": "en"
          }
        ],
        "shortDescriptions": [
          {
            "value": "Dr. G: Medical Examiner",
            "language": "en"
          }
        ],
        "releaseDate": "2022-04-04",
        "genres": [],
        "advisoryRatings": [
          {
            "source": "ACB",
            "value": "NR",
            "descriptors": []
          }
        ],
        "images": [
          {
            "type": "main",
            "url": "https://photos.example.com/DR-G-Medical-Examiner/i-gLD4LDf/0/0afaf6c6/X2/16x9_DRG-X2.jpg?impolicy=resize&w=1280&h=720"
          }
        ]
      }

Debugging from the Tools application side involves minimal involvement. However, if the content is still not found, our Backend team will help with inspecting the filtering logic.