This post is about what is probably a very niche issue, but I’ll publish it anyway, at least for my future reference.
For my birthday I received a yearly subscription to Sooner, a streaming service available in a few European countries, specialising in European independent films.
Since the platform also rents films, I already had an account, linked to a single sign-on with my Italian Apple account.
So, when I received the gift code, I logged into the website on my Mac, redeemed the code, received confirmation that the subscription was active, and then proceeded to try and watch a film on my Apple TV.
I logged on to the Sooner app on my Apple TV (actually: I linked the account by going again on the website, because it’s not possible to log in directly from the app), then I looked for a movie to watch, for the umpteenth time perplexed by the fact that for some reason all the film synopses were in Dutch (one of the official languages of Belgium, and not the one I know).
I chose anyway a title included in the subscription, and… I received an error message: ‘Subscription is not valid for this storefront’.
I went back to the website on my Mac, I tried to launch the same film, and it worked.
Maybe I should have linked the account on the TV to my Belgian Apple Account instead of the Italian one? It would make some sense, as the service is not active in Italy, and geographic restrictions might have been in place.
I switched accounts on the Apple TV, and this time, no error. But also no subscription.
A tour of several search engines didn’t offer any solution: probably there are not a lot of people in my situation.
Well, I thought, I can still do this the roundabout way: launch the film on my Mac or on the iPhone, and then AirPlay to the Apple TV, and so I did.
It wasn’t a great experience, because AirPlay is not the most stable connection, so the film stopped several times, and every time I had to relaunch it from the iPhone app, which also meant relaunching the whole app, and looking for the film again.
Not fully satisfied with the experience, at the end of the film I opened the Apple TV app again and checked my account, which seemed to be aware of my ongoing subscription, with its own transaction id: sooner-be-svod-fr-365d-xxxxxx.
Uhm. The ‘365d’ part clearly identifies the annual validity, and the ‘fr’… could it be that the issue was linked to the Dutch-only descriptions?
Dutch is often considered the default language for Belgian services, so… could it be my Apple TV should have been informed I would prefer French?
A quick descent into the device settings showed indeed that I didn’t have that language installed (as opposed to all my other Apple devices being set to use French as the main one).
I added it, then I relaunched the Sooner app, tried to launch a film and… it worked!