Your login details are being rejected: the six causes worth checking
Authentication failures nearly always come from one of six things, and only one of them needs us. Here is how to tell them apart in a couple of minutes.
The subscription has expired#
Check this first, because most players report an expired line as an authentication failure rather than saying anything about dates. It is the single most common cause and the easiest to confirm.
Sign in to the account page and look at the end date. If it has passed, nothing is broken and a renewal restores the same details. Renew with the email address you originally ordered with so the time is added to the existing line rather than creating a second one.
A space has come along for the ride#
Copying a username from an email frequently picks up a trailing space, and most players do not trim it. The field looks correct and the login fails, which is a frustrating combination.
Clear the field completely and type the value by hand. If your player shows the saved profile, check for a gap after the last character. This is far more common than it sounds, and it accounts for a good share of the tickets that begin with the words I copied it exactly.
The keyboard has capitalised something#
Television keyboards and mobile keyboards both like to capitalise the first character of a field. Usernames and passwords are case sensitive, so a single helpful capital breaks the login.
Turn off auto-capitalisation before typing, or check the first character afterwards. While you are looking, distinguish a lower-case L from the digit one and a capital O from a zero, since those pairs are nearly identical in many television fonts.
The server address is not quite right#
The address must be entered exactly as it appears on the account page, including the http prefix and the port number if one is shown. Adding a trailing slash, dropping the port, or typing a URL from an old email will all fail.
Copy it from the account page rather than from memory. The copy buttons there exist precisely because this field is the one people get subtly wrong.
The device clock is wrong#
Streaming connections are time sensitive. A device whose clock is days out, which happens to boxes that have been unplugged for a while, can fail authentication with no useful message.
Set date and time to automatic in the device settings and restart it. This is a genuine cause on cheap Android boxes in particular, and it is invisible unless you go looking for it.
The slot is already in use#
Each device slot allows one stream at a time. When a second device signs in with the same username, one of the two connections gets refused, and some players describe that refusal as an invalid login.
If the failure only happens while somebody else is watching, this is your answer. Use the second slot credentials on the second device, or add a slot if there are more screens than slots in the house.
If none of those apply#
Message support with the order number, the exact wording on screen, and which of the six checks above you have already made. A photograph of the error is more useful than a description.
At that point the fault is on our side of the line, and it is something we can look at directly rather than something you can fix from where you are sitting.
Send your order number, the device and app, and which of the checks above you have already worked through. Starting from what you have ruled out means the first reply can be an answer.