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.
One of the most impactful updates we delivered was bringing voice guidance into the Roku application. The feature enables the app to read aloud interface elements and content cards, helping users orient themselves and understand what content is available without relying on sight.
With this update, we were able to accomplish the following:
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.
