by jandrese | 2025-12-01 19:04:06+00:00
This is no joke. I tried watching the latest episode of Plur1bus on Apple TV+ on my laptop and here's the steps I went through:

1. Start chrome, navigate to tv.apple.com, click on the #1 show of the day (no problem)

2. The site tells me I can sign up for the TV service that I already have instead of offering a play button.

3. I click on the "sign up" which pauses for 10 seconds then tells me I'm already subscribed why did I hit the button you idiot.

4. I back arrow to the original page, it still asks me to sign up, hit F5 a couple of times to no effect.

5. Reload tv.apple.com from the start and navigate to the page, now it finally shows a play button.

6. Hit the play button but it gives me a popup saying that I need to verify the three digits off of the back of my credit card. I enter the digits and click the next button, but nothing happens.

7. Off to Google where I learn that if that happens you can log into accounts.apple.com first to avoid it.

8. I go through the login process on apple's site, which involves pulling out my phone to scan a QR code.

9. On the Apple site I try to go to the AppleTV+ options, which requires a second QR scan on my phone because it's apparently a different account.

10. On the site I verify that it shows the ATV+ subscription is active.

11. Return to tv.apple.com and click on the show to see that it again says I need to sign up to the service.

12. Click on the sign up button again to be told that I'm already subscribed.

13. Go back and reload the page entirely again so the play button reappears.

14. Click on the play button and get asked for the three digits again. Groan.

15. This time the next button actually works (miracle!) and it loads a second page talking about parental controls with another non-working button on the bottom.

16. I close the window and click on my profile in the upper right, verify that the parental controls are off.

17. Attempt to watch again, but again get stuck doing the 3 digit verify and get stuck on the parental controls window.

18. Go back to the settings and try turning on parental controls, which requires setting a PIN and doing another account verification, but leaving them on the most permissive settings.

19. Return to the site, to discover that it asks for the 3 digits yet again and then send me to that parental controls screen again.

20. Go back to settings and turn off parental controls because that didn't help.

21. Hit up Google again and find a person who suggests that switching browsers might help. I'm running the most common browser with no extensions that I use for these streaming sites because they can be such a pain in the ass, but sure.

22. Fire up Firefox with uMatrix and Adblock+ and have to do the login stuff yet again, but this time the show actually plays.

So to watch an hour of TV I had to spend over 30 minutes faffing about with the stupid website. It made me pine for the days of piracy when this was all so easy. I also downplayed how many times I had to do the reload dance to even get the play button to appear, going back to the start only worked about 1 time out of 3.

This isn't the only time I've struggled with streaming sites. Acorn for example simply refused to stream to my home. My wife is really into British mystery series and was pretty excited about it, but we had to drop it because their website simply refused to deliver the video and their tech support was completely unhelpful.