A few weeks back, I went hunting for a Roku channel (aff) I remembered using years ago — some niche indie film vault I'd added by code on my old setup. It wasn't in the Channel Store on any of my three TCL Roku TVs. And it wasn't on the Roku website either. What happened was Roku quietly killed the whole non-certified channel system back in February 2022, and everything I'd collected got swept up with it. But the “Add channel with a code” page at my.roku.com is still alive, and after a few hours of Roku tinkering, I came away with a handful of channels worth keeping around — plus a separate stash of stuff hiding inside The Roku Channel (aff) itself.
The hidden channel system Roku quietly shut down
Private channels died in February 2022 — beta channels took their place
For about thirteen years, Roku ran a parallel ecosystem to its main Channel Store. Non-certified channels — most people called them private channels — were apps that developers could distribute without going through Roku's formal review. You'd find a code somewhere online, plug it in at my.roku.com, and within a day or two, the channel would show up on your TV. At their peak, there were close to a thousand of them.
Roku shut the whole thing down on February 23, 2022. The replacement, called beta channels, looks similar but has hard limits baked in: max 20 users per channel, and every beta…