@Joe Ferdinando thank you!

@Annie Kelly No, the process for creating a FireTV app is a lot different. I'm currently working on something for Amazon. Stay tuned.

@Karin Crawford Sorry for the late reply! I was on vacation and finally managed to get some time away from the screens. We’ve built quite a few websites using AI tools, and many of them are performing well. AI is generally very good at creating a properly structured website that Google can crawl and understand, as long as it’s given the right instructions. However, because most modern websites now have reasonably good technical structure, that alone won’t give you much of an advantage. The bigger factors in SEO, AEO and GEO are the quality and originality of your information, whether your business is recognized as an expert, and whether trusted websites are talking about you. In other words, having a perfectly crawlable website gets you into the game, but it doesn’t necessarily make Google or AI tools recommend you. I’ve been advising clients to focus more on publishing genuinely useful content, getting customer reviews on trusted platforms such as Trustpilot, earning mentions from relevant websites, and participating in real conversations on sites like Reddit. Press releases can also help when there’s something genuinely newsworthy to announce. Those outside signals can carry more weight than simply having a technically perfect website. Let me know if you’d like more information. I’d be happy to explain how we’re approaching SEO and AI search with the sites we’re building.

@Karin Crawford We went to Edmonton for 5 days. My wife and daughter participated in a mother/daughter "Mud Run", which is basically an obstacle course in a muddy field. It was a great time for all! The weather was a bit cold but overall a great experience and gave me a nice break from all the coding and marketing.

Not currently. It’s a great idea but we have to look into Roku’s terms of service and requirements for accessing that information. I know when we do paid subscriptions you can get some user information, and when those features are implemented in the launch kit, you should be able to get a list like that. Food for thought.

You bring up some great points. Vimeo has definitely had a complicated history with Roku and OTT. For most smaller channels, though, I still think Vimeo is a good option. Vimeo currently has a monthly bandwidth threshold of 2 TB, or 2,000 GB. That’s quite a bit of viewing for a small channel, and Vimeo says more than 99% of its users never reach that threshold. If a channel starts growing enough to approach it, that’s when it makes sense to look at other options. MediaBlaster isn’t limited to Vimeo. You can use another video host as long as it provides a Roku-compatible direct video stream, such as an HLS stream. Vimeo is our preferred option right now because its API allows us to integrate it directly into MediaBlaster and make importing and managing videos much easier. The best alternative we’ve found is Bunny.net. It’s extremely affordable, works well for video delivery, and gives channel owners more control over bandwidth costs. We’re currently looking into ways to integrate Bunny directly into MediaBlaster, and I’m hoping to have more to announce about that soon. And yes, definitely stay away from using YouTube as the video source for a Roku app. There are unofficial ways people try to extract YouTube streams, but they violate YouTube’s terms and can result in the videos being blocked, the YouTube account being terminated, or the Roku app running into publishing and legal problems. It’s simply not worth building a channel around something that could stop working without warning. My recommendation is to start with Vimeo if you already have it and keep an eye on your bandwidth reports as the channel grows. If bandwidth ever becomes a concern, Bunny.net will likely be the alternative I recommend.

Amazon S3 works fine for HLS video, but it does come with a few headaches. First, you’ll probably want to put CloudFront in front of it so your videos load quickly for viewers in different locations. You’ll also need to encode your videos into HLS yourself or use another AWS service, such as MediaConvert, to handle the encoding. It can definitely be cheaper than Vimeo, especially as you scale. The tradeoff is that you’re responsible for configuring and managing the storage, encoding and delivery. It gives you more control, but it isn’t nearly as plug-and-play as Vimeo or Bunny Stream.