How to track the first play(ing) event on Roku

Sometimes you want to know when a new stream starts playing for the first time, for example to forward a firstplay event to an analytics back-end. THEOplayer does not expose such an event, but you can implement it yourself, which gives you more control over its logic.

The implementation below listens for the first playing event after every source change. If the viewer pauses and resumes the stream, the event is not dispatched again. If the viewer switches to another stream, it is dispatched once more.

You can swap out the playing event for a play event, or for any other event for that matter.

Usage

sub Init()
  ...
  m.THEOplayer.callFunc("addEventListener", "sourcechange", m.top, "onSourceChange")
  ...
end sub

sub onSourceChange()
  m.THEOplayer.callFunc("removeEventListener", "playing", m.top, "onFirstPlaying")
  m.THEOplayer.callFunc("addEventListener", "playing", m.top, "onFirstPlaying")
end sub

sub onFirstPlaying(params)
  m.THEOplayer.callFunc("removeEventListener", "playing", m.top, "onFirstPlaying")
  print "First playing event! "; params
end sub