A public media organization delivering diverse content across multiple regions.
Increase viewership, stay competitive, and strengthen appeal to other TV channels to adopt their white-label solution.
Oxagile stepped in — accelerating the Roku app’s load times, boosting responsiveness, expanding features, and delivering rock-solid performance and reliability.
Is all it takes for the app to launch
Load speed improvement
Flawlessly render on the home screen with zero lag
The app was initially built with Roku’s Direct Publisher — a limited but quick, code-free way to launch channels. Once Roku announced its deprecation, the client’s app was migrated to SGDex, a framework offering a basic set of configurable components. By the time our team joined the project, the codebase had already become quite complex and heavily reliant on this structure.
SGDex, built on BrighterScript, offers limited flexibility and wasn’t designed for API-heavy features or modern UX patterns. A full rewrite would have been costly and time-consuming, so we extended the framework with custom components — unlocking new capabilities without compromising the existing system.
The app streams the client’s content and can be rebranded by other stations for their audiences. This multi-client model demanded flexible, modular design and functionality, ensuring easy customization and consistent performance across versions without code duplication or fragmentation.
Roku’s platform sets firm boundaries that shape how apps must be built. Our years-long experience focuses on working within those limits creatively and efficiently to deliver fast, reliable experiences, while respecting these constraints. This mindset allowed us to address the client’s challenges head-on and build solutions that truly work in practice.
The app exceeded Roku’s 15-second launch-to-home requirement due to overloaded home screens — some stations loaded 80+ content rails in one API request. Caching couldn’t help, as many rails were personalized and only general content is cacheable.
To speed up app launch, we restructured the data-fetching process. Instead of one large API call, we split it into five:
All requests run in parallel, so total load time depends only on the slowest one.
This change allowed back-end caching for general content and significantly improved responsiveness. As a result, stations with 80+ rails now load in about 8 seconds — nearly twice as fast as before.
Roku doesn’t allow sign-up via QR codes or external devices — the method the client previously relied on. With little time to pivot, they needed to build:
We built the entire user authentication and onboarding flow from scratch, ensuring full compliance with Roku certification requirements, including:
Some channels contain over 80 content rails, each with numerous images. Roku devices, being relatively limited in memory and processing power, struggled to load all of this content at once. As a result, images could be pushed out of memory before display, causing flickering or visible gaps on the screen — significantly degrading the user experience.
We built a custom home screen with lazy loading, allowing content to load progressively as users scroll. This approach delivered a smoother, more stable experience by:
The client needed to support pre-roll ads for unsubscribed users. However, the requirement went beyond simply showing ads — the key challenge was to implement logic ensuring that users don’t see the same pre-roll ad twice for the same piece of content.
We implemented a smart ad tracking system that logs ad views per user and per content item. This ensures:
For example, if a user starts a movie, sees the pre-roll ad, but doesn’t finish it, they won’t see that ad again when they return to continue watching.
A tailored Roku app for a prominent European music streaming service, enabling their expansion into the U.S. market by leveraging Roku’s extensive user base and platform capabilities.
A multi-tenant video streaming platform, enabling scalable live and on-demand content delivery across eight platforms, thereby broadening audience reach and improving content accessibility.
