Channels & viewing

[MrMark]

How did you work this out?  I messed with it until I was sick of it and never saw it.

[Psilobite]

I can't remember now for sure, but it was probably by accident... typed youtube.com/activate instead of youtube.com/tv/activate and was surprised to see the brand account appear. I knew selecting it first on a app reset would probably get it back to how it was.

I suspect this is something that will stop working eventually. In that case, the only choice (if youtube hasn't fixed brand accounts that appear on a primary main Google sign in) will be to create a new Google account, then move the brand account to it. As I mentioned this loses/resets search and watch history, and breaks off access to all of your old comments.

[MrMark]

Well, I tried adding all my brand channels and then my main Google ID, and the history *seemed* to be working, so if it holds, I'd consider this to be a reasonable work-around.  And then hopefully, the parties will eventually come to terms and everything will work "properly".  As opposed to your prediction that it'll just get worse...losing interaction history would be unacceptable to me.

What I find troubling is that Roku didn't have a team of people working on this as hard as you apparently were.

[Fretman]

@Psilobite , thank you for your solution.  Now able to get my Watch History working again using my branded account.

[eighmii]

ARE YOU REALLY TELLING ME THAT all I had to do was type youtube.com/activate instead of youtube.com/tv/activate?! (Yes - it actually works! I've been trying to solve this for months and thought it was a Youtube issue for some reason - hence why it took months.) I didn't think to grab screenshots unfortunately, but by typing the url without the "/tv", it will prompt Google to ask you for permissions to access certain parts of your Google account, which does not happen if you type the URL as displayed by the Roku Youtube app (presumably due to an update, the Apple one in particular).

This issue has been driving me absolutely nuts for the last few months because I watch Youtube every day for hours and also fall asleep with the TV on, so I can never find where I left off! Or easily click on frequent searches in my history. Etc etc.. you all know the reasons why this is annoying. And I've been using the same branded account for roughly 15 years, I'm a mod on many channels, and I stream from my channel so switching/moving everything over to my regular Google account wasn't really an effective option as I go back and forth between TV and PC all the time. 

Basically this was a really long-winded, tl;dr way of saying THANK YOU FOR SAVING MY SANITY and essentially changing my life... back to the way it was a few months ago. 

[Psilobite]

Remember, if a video is age restricted, you won't be able to watch it. It will give a message, "Something went wrong - Sorry, something is wrong. This video may be inappropriate for some users. Sign into your primary account to confirm your age," with "Back" as the only option. Even if you sign into the YouTube Roku channel with your primary account, age restricted viewing will only work on the brand account appearing under your main Google sign in (the one that doesn't save watch history or show search history).

[MrMark]

Hey, it's q work-around, but as work-arounds go, it's a pretty good one!

[RegalElevator]

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@Psilobite wrote:

[...]

Hopes this helps some people...

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For any future readers of this thread - the solution worked for me as well - just going to youtube.com/activate. In my case there's a Google account and a kind-of-attached "YouTube only" account, and being able to select the latter on the /activate URL meant History worked again.

And thank you @Psilobite for taking the time to write this up - you've just made my life a little easier 🙂

[proto57]

I've been reading with interest all the related problems, and suggested solutions to this. It's really great that everyone is trying to solve it. Nothing has worked for me, however.

The most valuable advice seems to be that one should activate through "youtube.com/activate" rather than "youtube.com/tv/activate". But I cannot do either, because the only choices given me are to:

1) Sign in with your TV

2) Sign in with your phone

There is NO option for me to sign in on my laptop, which I think every other ROKU app allows. And signing in on the TV only brings me back to this broken ap, with no search history. But the fact that some of you were able to use this solution suggests to me that I may be either missing something/doing something wrong; or have a different device, software, or setup. What thinks you all?

Meanwhile, an odd semi-solution: I don't sign in at all. Strangely, that allows my search history to stay! Of course I have none of my subscriptions, but with the search history, I can just as quickly get to my favorite channels. For instance, I search for "samcrac" once, and then when I want to go the channel again, it is either there on the list, or I just have to type "s" or "sa" and I've got it.

And it seems there are WAY LESS commercials. When I am logged on, for even the shortest videos, I get double commercials every two or three minutes... and many are not "skippable". But when not logged on, there are far fewer commercials, usually just two at the beginning, and once more in the middle. Ahhhhh... and, they are usually allowed to be skipped.

Of course since this barrage... curse... flood... of commercials that Youtube had unleashed on us... I find my self on my laptop watching far more often, because here I can control the ads... that is, use my old buddy which rhymes with "cad docker".

Anyway, great input from others, and I'm glad it worked for many... maybe someone can tell me what I'm doing wrong, so I can possibly get it to work for me.

Proto57

[MrMark]

I appreciate @Psilobite 's work-around too - I'm using it myself!

With that said, I just don't want anyone to mistake this for a proper solution.  For example, I have noticed that there are now multiples of my brand channels, and it's not clear how to distinguish one from the other, nor whether it affects the history on the given Roku device and/or all other devices that use the same(?) history.  There are some other strange behaviors too, that I can't quite put my finger on.  Maybe it's just because I spent so much time using the "wrong" channels, but it seems to me that some of the history (and recommendations) is propagating between channels.  I'll post again if it becomes clear that this is actually true.