May 2024 Unauthorized.TV Subscription Guide

How to rejoin the ranks of the UATV subscribers with the help of our partners at the original subscription site

Yesterday, May 15th 2024, Unauthorized subscribers once again received the ability to subscribe to the site and its various creators for the first time since this February. While this is not a return to full functionality for reasons which will shortly be made clear, it is a huge step forward for the team and a major relief to our creators who have to a man, woman, and bear been extremely patient about the whole thing.

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:

The pixelated text should show your name and email address from your subscription site account

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