The problem was traced to a single faulty hard drive in one of our primary servers. This drive was failing in an unusual way—it wasn’t reporting errors, but it was severely degrading the performance of the entire system.

Our team worked to identify and replace this drive. The process was more complex than anticipated, causing some temporary instability during the repair. However, the drive was successfully swapped out at the end of October, and the system has now fully rebuilt itself without any loss of data.

We are happy to report that all performance issues have been eliminated, and the platform has since been running smoothly again.

This incident has reinforced the importance of our ongoing project to build a more robust, globally redundant content delivery network (CDN) and general fallback mechanism. We are accelerating this work to prevent any single point of failure in the future. As always, antifragility is the name of the game.

Thank you for your patience and continued support! For those interested in the full technical story, our server admin Rifleman has written a detailed account of the troubleshooting process for his new tech blog “Tactical BSD”:

Tactical BSD

ZFS Horror Story

For several weeks, performance on a particular video streaming server had been going downhill, and I could not figure out why. Creators were getting frustrated. Video uploads were going at a crawl’s pace, even logins paused for several seconds. Bear in mind that this is a 48-core EPYC system with 100TB of storage, 10-Gigabit networking, and 512GB RAM. N…

Read more

5 months ago · 8 likes · Rick Morris (rifleman)

—Jordamøn

While this naturally means that there aren’t many new developments to announce, we are pleased to report that the bank transfer payment system put in place last month has been successful enough to allow the reinstatement of the hard paywall. As of September 1st, an active subscription to Unauthorized will be required in order to view livestreams and/or published videos.

Subscribe to Unauthorized.TV!

The plan is to give creators individual control over their content, so that certain videos of their choosing can be made available to the general public after publication. For now, livestreams will remain behind the paywall at least until the chat system has received the upgrades it is due for.

The comment system is still in development, but should become available to subscribers sometime in September. Work has been temporarily paused on the new frontend since we are pushing forward with some major backend upgrades, the purpose of which cannot yet be made public.

As always, thank you very much to all of the subscribers and especially to the non-US supporters who have made use of the new bank transfer option. It is only thanks to you that Unauthorized has survived the previous year and a half; now that we are back on our feet we look forward to hitting these next few months hard and closing out the year with a platform that is better, stronger, and more independent than ever.

For those who are still on the fence; you have until the 1st of September to decide if this is a ride you want to be part of. We strongly urge you to join the crew and subscribe to keep Vox, RazörFist, the Big Bear, and the other Unauthorized creators on the air in the face of Clown World’s censorship!

—Jordamøn

Today, we’re introducing two major upgrades:

1. Annual plans for all subscriptions

2. Bank transfer payments via SWIFT for subscribers worldwide

These changes are not just new payment options. They are part of our long-term strategy to maintain uninterrupted, entirely antifragile service regardless of the actions of external payment processors.

Bank transfers come with their own limitations and requirements, and we hope to cover all of the relevant details in this article. That being said, the important thing to remember is that they provide a reliable, independent fallback option when all other systems fail.

The big news

As of now, annual plans are available for all subscription types. Most are priced at an equivalent value to their monthly counterparts, though the Premium subscription keeps its 1-month discount under the classic Annual plan.

By purchasing these plans, you are guaranteed a full calendar year of uninterrupted access to Unauthorized regardless of any changes to the payment system in the meantime.

The introduction of annual plans across the board also means we can now accept international bank transfers via SWIFT. Due to the increased overhead of manually processing wire payments, this option is only available for:

• Annual subscription plans;

• Superchat token bundles of $50 or more.

This means that non-US viewers finally have a way of subscribing again, in the absence of a functioning card payment option. However, it must be noted that wire transfers involve several additional considerations, which are covered later in this article.

Subscribe to Unauthorized.TV!

Subscribe from anywhere

To set up/renew an annual subscription (or purchase superchat tokens) via bank transfer, follow these steps:

1. Choose the annual plan you want to buy, either from the full subscription list or from the “subscribe” link under any video or livestream.

2. At checkout, select the “Bank transfer” payment method. This option only appears for annual subscription plans and for superchat token bundles worth $50 or more.

3. Accept the ToS and hit the yellow purchase button. You will be taken to a page with payment instructions.

   

4. These instructions must be followed exactly when entering your payment at your bank, otherwise we will not be able to receive the full amount and your order will not be processed.

5. Once your payment has been submitted at your bank, it will normally take 1-3 business days for the banks to complete your transfer and another day or so for us to see your payment and process your order, since all wire transfers have to be handled manually.

6. You can check on the status of your order(s) at any time on your Unauthorized account page. We will also be introducing automatic order confirmation emails and order delivery alerts so that you can be notified immediately once your order has been processed, though these are still a work in progress.

Important considerations for bank transfers

There’s a reason card payments are so ubiquitous these days - bank transfers are tricky, expensive, and require considerably more effort on the part of the customer to be done properly. With that in mind, here are the key requirements and limitations of using bank transfers on Unauthorized:

• Bank fees apply: nearly all banks, no matter where in the world, charge fees for international payments and for currency conversions. These fees vary by bank and by day, meaning it is essentially impossible to predict what they will be for any given customer on any given day.

  • All transaction fees, including intermediary bank charges, are your responsibility. This means that, at your bank, you must accept all fees when sending your payment. Unauthorized is not a payment service and we do not have the resources to recalculate all of our prices for everyone around the world.

  • Fees typically range from $15-$50 depending on your bank, location, and currency. For those unaccustomed to bank transfers, the total fees are usually not known until after the payment goes through. So you will see the amount you paid reserved for payment, and then after the payment has cleared you will see a slightly larger amount actually debited from your account.

  • We can only accept payment in US dollars. If you have a USD account at your bank, this will almost certainly be the least expensive one to use in terms of transfer fees. Otherwise, you will have to submit payment in USD and accept the additional conversion fee from your local currency.

  • We cannot credit partial payments. Your subscription will only be activated/renewed and your superchat tokens will only be delivered once we have received the full amount for your order.

• Processing time: bank transfers are just about the slowest form of digital payment in existence. Compared to credit/debit cards, it’s the digital equivalent of driving rather than booking an airline.

  • Transfers typically take 1-3 business days to complete.

  • Some international transfers may take up to 7 business days, in extreme cases.

  • Your order will only be processed after we receive the full amount.

• No automatic renewals

  • Unlike card payments, bank transfers do not support auto-renewal.

  • You’ll need to manually renew your subscription after it expires in a year’s time.

  • We will be soon be introducing subscription renewal emails, so you won’t be caught off guard by your subscription’s expiration.

  • If you would like to set up a recurring payment for your subscription, please contact us to discuss it on a case-by-case basis.

• No refunds

  • Due to the irreversible nature of bank transfers, all payments are final.

  • We quite simply cannot process refunds for bank transfer payments.

  • Please ensure the correct USD amount (including fees) is being sent before submitting your payment!

  • Cases of accidental overpayment will be compensated with the appropriate number of superchat tokens.

What’s the point?

Given all of these conditions & caveats and the effort that goes into making bank transfers work, you might be wondering why we’re bothering to do this.

To make a long story short, bank transfers are just about the ultimate backup plan. We’ve gained and lost various payment processing contracts before, most recently this spring, and it’s always a massive blow to have to rebuild our subscriber base from the ground up.

Remember, Unauthorized does not sell ads, does not take sponsorship, and does not take outside investment. We are 100% subscriber-funded and we do not answer to anybody except our own subscribers.

Subscribe to Unauthorized.TV!

Therefore, an option which does not allow any middleman to interfere with our core business is absolutely worth providing even if it is slower and more difficult to use than more sophisticated methods. As cumbersome as bank transfers are, they give us total independence from payment service providers—which is quite simply invaluable nowadays.

In addition to that, the only non-bank transfer option that we currently offer is Silicon Prairie’s e-Check system which can only handle American subscribers. With bank transfers, our most dedicated supporters in Europe, Asia, Australia, and the rest of the world have a guaranteed path to remaining subscribed.

As Unauthorized grows and develops, we will bring back card payments and continue to add other payment options as the opportunities present themselves. But the bank transfer option is here to stay as the backup plan for everybody.

What’s next?

The next visible change to Unauthorized will likely be the introduction of comments under published videos, as mentioned in last month’s article. In a similar fashion to the live chats, the comments will be publicly visible though only active subscribers will be able to engage.

We also intend to up our email game considerably in the near future with regards to order confirmations and subscription renewal/expiration alerts. It is our hope that this will reduce confusion regarding the statuses of your subscriptions.

Finally, development of our new frontend is continuing apace and we expect the first signs of that work to begin appearing in the early autumn.

Recap

With the introduction of annual plans and international bank transfers, we now have multiple avenues to maintain the fully independent operation of Unauthorized. While we recognize that these payment methods are not ideal for all users, they are the lifeline that allow us to push onward when mainstream options become unavailable.

We sincerely appreciate your continued support and encouragement as we continue to build and strengthen the infrastructure of Unauthorized. Your subscriptions fuel our creators, our ongoing operations, and continued development & improvement of the platform.

Subscribe to Unauthorized.TV!

We are all perfectly aware of the difficulty of achieving complete independence, and each successive challenge has made Unauthorized more resilient than before. All of us, subscribers, creators, supporters, and developers, are continually proving that Unauthorized can survive and even thrive as a subscriber-funded platform without the need for external funding or the approval of traditional payment processors.

Thank you all for being part of this journey and sticking with us throughout!

—Jordamøn

Above all else, we must give a massive thank you to everyone who has re-subscribed through the new e-Check system! Your support has already nearly reached the level at which we can keep the lights on indefinitely, and the importance of retaking control of our own subscription system cannot be overstated.

Subscribe to Unauthorized.TV!

Now that Unauthorized is a self-contained and fully independent platform, we have been able to start moving extremely fast on projects that have been slow burners since 2023 and earlier. The manner in which Silicon Prairie has been integrated gives us total operational flexibility and will allow us to easily plug in additional payment solutions down the road whether they be card, crypto, or even more exotic systems. It has also allowed us to bring back superchats for the first time since early 2024, much to the delight of the Big Bear and his fellow creators.

e-Check & subscription notes

By far, the main issue several people have had in using the e-Check system is getting their bank accounts verified before they can make any purchases. We’d like to clear a few things up in that regard:

1. Verification will always take at least a day. Silicon Prairie verifies your bank account exactly the same way PayPal does, by sending two amounts under $1.00 and then canceling the transaction. This will always take at least one business day unless you get remarkably lucky, so there is no need to keep the verification page open. Once your account has been registered and is awaiting verification, it will appear in the Payments section of your Unauthorized account page so you can return to it at any later date.

2. You cannot register the same bank account more than once. This is a security feature enforced by Silicon Prairie, so there is no point in repeatedly trying to register the same bank account. It will either work on the first try or it’s not going to work at all. This also means that you will not be able to re-register the same bank details if you remove that registration from your Unauthorized account, so please be careful about doing that.

3. The Silicon Prairie integration is not yet 100% complete. Without getting too technical, we do not yet have an automatic way of marking your pending payments received. It’s all manual at this point, so please do not be overly concerned if your payments are still marked “pending” on Unauthorized well after they have cleared. The folks at Silicon Prairie are working on providing us with a feature to take care of that pretty much instantaneously, and it will be implemented as soon as it’s ready.

We also had a few questions from people wanting to see the full list of available subscriptions, or wondering how to subscribe to a particular creator.

• You can see the full list of Unauthorized subscription plans by clicking “SUBSCRIBE” or “New subscription” from your account page. You’ll also get the same list if you click the “Subscribe” link under content from a channel that does not have a subscription of its own. Or you could just click this button:

  Subscribe to Unauthorized.TV!

• You can subscribe to a particular creator/channel from any page associated with them. For example, under any video or livestream from Owen Benjamin you should see something like this:

  

  That button should take you directly to a “Feed the Bear” subscription checkout. The same button appears at the top of his channel & creator pages:

  

Finally, many non-US community members have been understandably concerned about the fact that Silicon Prairie is only available in the United States. While we are constantly working to regain a global payment option, we would like to make it entirely clear that nobody is ever going to be locked out without the possibility of accessing the content.

As a matter of fact, we have been weighing the option of removing the paywall permanently for access to most content, and only making subscriptions a requirement for livestream chat participation and specific exclusives as well as some other upcoming features that will be mentioned later. Regardless of how that decision ends up playing out, we will not under any circumstances return to the hard paywall until all of our supporters have a way of subscribing.

In terms of specific solutions, we are currently building a system to allow anyone in the world to purchase annual subscription plans via manual wire transfer. As a consequence, once that system is ready we will be offering annual plans for every subscription on Unauthorized. Other options such as new regular card processors (which we can now add/remove at the drop of a hat) and (for the vocal minority) crypto will be explored afterwards in due time.

The return of the superchat

Moving on from last month’s matters of subscriptions & payments, the big news for June is of course that superchats are back on Unauthorized!

Similar to mainstream video platforms such as YouTube & Twitch, superchats allow you to send highlighted messages in the livestream chat window. On Unauthorized, they work by means of tokens which can be purchased through your account page.

Buy superchat tokens

Each token costs $1 and they can be purchased in bundles of varying size. That $1 value of each token spent on a creator’s livestream is then shared with them on top of their revenue from subscriptions, giving them an incentive to go live more frequently and engage more with the chat.

The chat itself will also be overhauled before long; many viewers will have noticed that there is a significant delay between messages making it hard to hold actual conversations. This, incidentally, was the cause of Vox Day’s notorious election night stream last November, when record numbers of concurrent viewers overloaded the service and crashed the chat. While we have already implemented measures to mitigate the chances of that happening again with even greater numbers of viewers, the user experience is still not as good as it could be and should be.

Therefore, we have now begun developing a new real-time chat service that is lightweight, durable, and can be utilized by any number of different platforms simultaneously - not just Unauthorized. It will probably be some time before it’s ready for action, but this has the potential to be a game-changer for the wider community and we very much look forward to rolling it out.

What’s next?

1. Payments: Unauthorized is still limited by its payment solutions, so integrating a worldwide payment system has to remain our top priority. The aforementioned wire transfer method will come first, after which we will begin looking into ways to bring back card payments as well as (eventually) expanding to crypto.

2. New features: While the real-time chat continues to take shape, we will also be adding comments to Unauthorized videos in the near future. It’s past time we allowed viewers to engage with the content even if they didn’t catch the livestream. Naturally, the ability to write comments will be limited to paying subscribers.

3. New look: As the early access group knows, there has been a new design for Unauthorized in development for some time. This new frontend is enormously more modern, polished, and easy on the eyes compared to the current site, and we hope that you will all get to enjoy it before long.

Recap

This has been your Unauthorized sitrep for June 2025; we hope that any questions you might have about the recent changes have now been answered and that the current state of affairs is now clear to everybody.

Once again, massive thanks must go to all of you for your continued support and patience. Being able to work on such an immense, challenging, and frankly awesome project is a true privilege and we would not—could not—keep hammering away if it weren’t for each and every one of you.

We have now, together, overcome the fourth payment deplatforming in 5 years. Nobody can stop us. They can hurt Unauthorized, sure, and they can slow us down, but as long as we have this community to serve we will always find a way forward and we will always build back stronger than before.

Until next time, Happy Otter Month!
—Jordamøn

May 5th 2025

• Subscriptions are once again available for purchase & renewal

• Instead of credit/debit cards, we now use e-Check payments going directly bank-to-bank

• e-Checks are much more reliable, but are slower than card payments

• Currently only available to holders of USA checking/savings accounts

• Register for e-Check payments on account->payments page—bank account must be verified before payments can be made

• Verification is done via penny-testing—two amounts less than a dollar are deposited and then withdrawn from the subscriber’s bank account, creating a record which the user can see and enter on UATV

• Subscribing/renewing a subscription with a verified account is instantaneous—we deliver the subscription even before receiving the payment. In the rare case that the payment should fail the subscription is temporarily suspended until the situation can be rectified.

• The subscription paywall has been turned off throughout April, but is being turned back on tomorrow

• Superchats are not ready yet, but will be within a week

• Superchats will be available for use upon payment completion, rather than immediately like subscriptions

• Some US banks do not do e-Checks. In this case you will need to use a credit card when that system is up again.

All subscriptions, including the annual ones, will be honored; UATV will continue to operate unchanged throughout this process and all of the creators will continue to stream and upload videos as before. This is not our first rodeo.

Please sign up for a free subscription here in order to let us quickly communicate to you with regards to the latest developments on UATV. If we’re posting something here, it’s probably important.

The Ride Never Ends.

This first issue of our Substack newsletter is intended to help both new and returning subscribers through the process of subscribing to Unauthorized as things currently stand, as well as answer the most frequent questions we have been receiving since the update landed.

The first and most critical thing to know is that the mechanics of subscribing are NOT handled by Unauthorized right now. They are being handled by an external partner, whom many of the subscribers will remember as our original hosts from back in 2018-2020. Back in the days before the Big Bear sat on their servers and broke them, and before Unauthorized.TV existed as an independent platform.

This situation, while an infinite improvement over the total subscription blackout Unauthorized has been battling through, necessarily comes with a few challenges and limitations. Our partners run a very different system to ours, and what we would call a “subscription” they treat as a “membership” just to name one of the important differences. The majority of the work we are doing is focused on cutting out as much of the confusion and required effort on the subscribers’ part as humanly possible; this guide is written to help bridge the gap.

Therefore, without further ado, here is the definitive guide to subscribing to Unauthorized in May 2024!

1. Log in to Unauthorized!

This might seem obvious, but nothing in the rest of this guide is going to do you any good if you are not already logged in to Unauthorized.

2. Choose a subscription

Whether you pick a subscription from the list through your Subscriptions page or click the link beneath a video or livestream doesn’t matter; the important thing is that whichever subscription you choose, you will end up at this checkout page:

When you accept the terms & conditions and hit the “Purchase” button, you will be taken to our partners’ site to conclude the payment. Remember, it’s completely separate from Unauthorized!

3. Log in to (or create) your subscription site account

You’re going to see this screen:

This is where things start getting a little complicated, so please read closely and figure out which of these cases applies to you:

• If you were a subscriber in 2021 or earlier, you almost certainly already have an account on the subscription site. So click the “Log in” link and try logging in using your UATV email address. You cannot expect your UATV password to work on the subscription site! Give it a go by all means, but you’ll probably have to use the “Forgot password?” link. If you used a different email address back in 2021 than you do on UATV nowadays, use that old email address to get yourself logged in and move on to the next step.

• If your first interaction with UATV was after 2021, you probably do not have an account on the subscription site yet. Therefore, you can simply fill in the email address and password that you use on UATV and create yourself a matching account on the subscription site.

Once you have gotten yourself logged into your subscription site account, be it new or rediscovered, you can fill in your payment details and purchase your subscription. Now it’s time to return to Unauthorized proper!

4. Link your UATV account to the external subscription site

Go to your UATV Account page; assuming you have not already connected your UATV and external subscription site accounts, you will see this section:

Unless your subscription site account uses a different email address than your UATV account, you can simply click the green “Link account” button.

If you do use a different email address on the subscription site, click the white “Different email?” button to fill in the email address of your subscription site account. Then click the green “Link account” button when you’re ready.

If you have completed the 3 previous steps, you should now see something like this on your Account page:

At this point, you will officially be a registered Unauthorized.TV subscriber!

The work on this integration is not finished; your subscription doesn’t show up on your UATV Subscriptions page yet and your payments on the subscription site don’t appear on your UATV Payments page. However, Unauthorized is already tracking both of these things and both will become visible to you as soon as we’ve developed the proper way to fit our partners’ data models into our system and display them to you. We will not put the paywall back up until this is done, as it would be completely unfair to keep people guessing otherwise. This update is scheduled to be completed in July.

That’s all for now on the technical front; we hope you have gotten everything you needed here. If, after having read through and completed this guide, you still have questions or are still encountering a problem, please do ONE of the following:

1. Contact the devs by email (best chance of getting help directly);

2. Tag @uatv on SocialGalactic, assuming you’re a member (other members may be able to help quicker than we can get to you);

3. Write to us in the comments here on Substack (no guarantee that we’ll read or answer them, but we’re curious to see how well they work).

Lastly, and most importantly, thank you for following us, supporting us, and fighting alongside us through the constant BS being thrown our way! We know it’s not always easy, we know this is one of the times it’s less easy than it has been, and we truly appreciate the effort that you are going to by reading this guide and getting through the whole process just to support this platform we have built together.

We devs are immensely proud that you value our work enough to go through this all with us, and we are absolutely determined to get the whole thing back to full functionality ASAP for your enjoyment.

Cheers to you all!

— Jordamøn