Your Apple TV is not authorized to play this content

I'm interested in the resolution too, as I just purchased an ATV. Along with not being able to watch UTube ("There's a problem connecting with UTube. Try again later"), the songs I've purchased through iTunes "aren't authorized". I'm trying the de-authorization/authorization fix right now. It's re-synce huge numbers of files, so i won't know till in the morning if if worked. Your post indicates it may now.

Now I know why I still buy CDs...

Just curious if you ever got this to work -- I'm still having the same issue.

Gotta go -- off to the CD store to buy new music. At least I know it will work!

I'm with you, for what it's worth. I've got two ATVs (purchased shortly after the product was introduced), and have had endless grief over synching, authorizing, reauthorizing, etc. ever since Apple updated the software to allow rentals (which, by the way, transformed a perfectly elegant and functional menu system into a hopelessly cluttered mess). Very frustrating. . .

OK. This is weird. I would think the Holy Grail of Apple's Music Store would be to encourage use of their purchased muzak, not to cripple it in one of their newer products. So why doesn't it work on ATV?

I'm assuming everyone else is having this problem too, but (since only a few of us have bothered to grouse about it online) they've all just accepted it & moved on...

Am I getting testy?

I came on here today to start up a topic about this and I find there's already one set up!

I'm also having this problem. I have 2 ATV's, having bought the second a few days ago. Both units have the same playlists synchronised to them and before I bought the second unit, the first ATV played everything. I've now found that since buying the second ATV, I'm getting the 'not authorised' message for a small handful of songs in the 'Purchased' playlist on BOTH ATV's. And there are songs that play on the second ATV that won't play on the original ATV and vice versa. Both units are the new ATV's BTW and had the Take 2 software already installed.

Strange. And very annoying.

What does the de-authorise function do in itunes anyway? And do you have to re-authorise afterwards?

Message was edited by: Julian Roche1

No, not much progress being made here.

I've de-authorized & re-authorized a number of times & still get the same message. I can play/stream these tunes from my laptop & the album cover art, etc. shows up on the TV, but cannot play them from ATV.

One thing I've noticed is that my laptop (a MacBook Pro), which is also in my living room, responds to my clicks on the remote, even though I'm aiming it at the ATV in the opposite direction. So it's duplicating, essentially, what I'm seeing on the screen of the ATV. It just occurred to me that maybe there's a conflict there -- I'm at the office right now, so I'll try controlling the ATV with the laptop turned off when I get home.

Another thread of mine on the discussion board that isn't going anywhere either is concerning YouTube, which is also not working on this new ATV. It just says that no content is available and that it can't connect with YouTube at the moment & to try again later. Entering my username & password for youtube is refused also. Not trying to cross-post here, but mention it in the unlikely case the two are related.

My ATV is broken in the same ways described in this and several other threads; no trouble from 2.0, freezes & resets in 2.0.1. For me, the most frustrating part of this broken update is the lack of any news at all from Apple regarding work on a fix. It seems that many have found their money (for now) wasted, hoping somebody from Apple reads this and is working on a solution. Do we wait a couple of days? A week? Month? Or do 99% of the boxes work great and we're hung out there?

Apple, Inc. - you're not yet an evil empire, with luck you never will be. How about some estimate, some reassurance I'm not stuck with a $300 box that just warms the top shelf under my TV? Heck, even some movie trailers come up with a message about an incompatible format.

Another glitch that I'm going to post elsewhere, but am doing it here to put it in context. I have to believe it's all related.

I tried tonight to buy my first TV show on ATV from the Apple Store. It, of course, wanted my username & password. I entered it & it was rejected. I re-entered several times. No luck.

I've had the same thing happen when I tried to enter my YouTube username & password. It wouldn't accept it. I thought it was a fluke w/YouTube. Apparently not so.

So, I can't buy or rent movies/TV shows. Exactly why do I want this gadget?

I have to figure that there are several possibilities here:

1. No one else is having these weird problems and we're all being ignored by the rest of the ATV community who are blissfully enjoying themselves with their ATVs.
2. Everyone else is having these problems, but have just resigned themselves to only using their ATVs to warm their Columbia Roast.
3. There's some odd variable in the paltry few of us who are having these problems. And there's not enough of us to raise a red flag in Cupertino.

I'm getting dangerously close to returning this within my 14 day return period.

I had this same notification last night and it prevented me to play a movie I had previously purchased and downloaded on Apple TV. *I was able to solve this problem in this manner*:
On the Apple TV, I went to menu, and then to settings.
On settings, I clicked on wireless configuration, then reset wireless configuration.
This brought up my network, which I confirmed by typing in my password for my network.
After I did this, everything started working properly.

Another thing that I had noticed was that my Apple TV was no longer appearing in my itunes.
As soon as I went through the procedure listed above, ATV reappeared in itunes.

This seems so basic I hesitated to post this message. I hope it helps someone. It did it for me.

I had this problem with my second AppleTV and went through all the troubleshooting steps listed on teh Apple Support pages for this problem. This included authorising/deauthorising ad rebuilding my library - I do not recommend anyone does the latter as it hosed all the custom metadata I'd added to imported files including album art.

Even after doing all of this and rebooting several times it still would not authorise.

Then out of the blue things just worked one day - I have no explanation other than perhaps AppleTV connects directly to iTunes Store servers to authenticate and that for some reason these servers might have been down or playing up.

I suspect there are multiple underlying factors and causes with individual explanation, but this sort of thing really puts you off buying Store content as when you're a paying customer who does not download stuff from torrents etc it is quite galling to be told that you cannot watch what you've paid for! The evils of DRM strike again.

AC

I wanted to try this, but I must have a different menu than what you describe -- there was no option to reset wireless connection. Instead, it's just an option to select my home network or "Other". Just to check , I re-entered my home net's password. But I still can't play "authorized content".

Last night I even bought a TV show just to see if those would work. Same message: "Apple TV is not authorized to play this content."