macOS Catalina TV app not showing my iTunes library

I tied to "unhide" my movies and got the message:

You have no hidden movie purchases.

which matches my expectation. I have hidden some TV shows where I purchased both season 1 (at first) and then all seasons ("Complete Series") since it was not helpful to have season 1 listed twice ... I hide season 1 so that every season shows up just once.

So, still nothing showing up in my online Library, though everything shows up in the Store ("Purchases") and in the Up Next list on the Watch Now page.

Also, no change with macOS Catalina 10.15.1.

I tried doing Safe Boot (hold down Shift while macOS is booting) and again there is no change.

It is seeming to me that the problem is server side. I noticed that my iTunes on Windows was not showing recent purchases, so I tried logging out of the iTunes store and back in. This has fixed things in the past when purchases weren't showing up, but this time I have lost the ability to see anything ... iTunes says "Cannot make your purchases available." or something like that.

Frankly, the whole iTunes movie/TV show ecosystem is breaking down for me. Things are at least partially broken on tvOS (Apple TV 4K), macOS (MacBook Pro 2017, TV app) and Windows (iTunes). iPadOS and iOS are very slow to show updates but so far they are basically working ... counting my blessings. But many movie posters are in the wrong language or edition ... my recent purchase of the movie Uncommon Valor shows a movie poster saying Los Valientes. The Accidental Tourist has a poster (thumbnail) saying Un Tropiezo Llamado Amor.

I'm not feeling the "It Just Works" magic at the moment ...

Thanks to all the folks who have spent hours working on this, and especially thanks for all of the additional information!

It does seem clear that the source of the problem is on the server side. My server-side library was apparently "upgraded" when I installed macOS Catalina 10.15 on my MacBook Pro, but the server-side changes had the side effect of breaking iTunes as well.

Yes, it seems that lack of testing let this slip through.

But the person who I talked to who called me from Apple told me that there ARE people with libraries of a size similar to mine who are not having problems. That's nice ... so maybe there was some testing ... just not enough.

As a thought experiment, imagine that I had a large iTunes library of movies that I had bought on my iPad, which we'll assume was my only Apple device. If I then buy a brand new Mac that comes with Catalina preinstalled, what would I see? There would be no upgrade of a local iTunes library file, but would there be an upgrade on the server side, triggered by Catalina's attempt to access my library? Would the Apple TV app on Catalina work? Or would everything be just as broken?

It is surprising that this is taking this long to fix. It seems like Apple is all about services now, and they just broke one of their services badly. I'd think that Tim Cook would be eager to get this fixed before Apple's reputation becomes hopelessly tarnished.

Incredibly, things have gotten worse. I am now unable to sign in my Apple ID from the TV app, with the result that I can no longer use this app to do ANYTHING related to the thousands of movies and TV shows that I have purchased from iTunes.

The problem started when I tried to follow the suggested path to create a new administrator ID and to log into my Apple ID using that account. I did that, and it failed in the same way that my main account failed. I could see my more-or-less correct Up Next list on the Watch Now tab, but my library did not show up on the Library tab.

So, I logged out of the test account and logged back into my main account, from which I removed the test account.

But the Apple ID page in the System Preferences app said that my Apple ID needed something:

After completion of this step, I still was not logged into the iTunes Store in the TV app, so I tried to log in. There was no error message, but after providing my Apple ID and password I still was not logged in. Repeating the login attempt does nothing ... I cannot log in, though there is no error message. The login attempts just silently fail.

This is really pathetic. Things were close to problem-free in macOS Mojave ... they are completely broken now in Catalina.

Re: In short, after a very long time on the phone with a senior apple advisor, reinstalled mojave on all my macs.

Did that fix it for you? Another user said that once Catalina had lost his library it was also gone on his Mojave machine. For me, I have lost my library on iTunes on Windows ... I think the server has just screwed up my account badly and only the devices where I have not logged out retain any record of what I own. I will try not to let them log out until I see evidence that Apple has fixed this problem.

Devices that are not completely hosed yet:

Apple TV 4K (tvOS 13.2)

iPad Pro 2017 (iPadOS 13.2)

iPhone 7 Plus (iOS 13.2)

You are experiencing the same crap that I am ... neither my Apple TV 4K device nor my MacBook Pro running Catalina will show me my iTunes library of movies.

If you have a Windows machine, I bet it would show a version of the same problem ... I get the error another user described earlier in this thread where iTunes cannot access my purchased content. Just like on the Mac, I can still download things, I just can't see the list of what I own to download! So far, my iPad still shows the library.

My Apple support person has not responded to my latest request for info. It seems like we've fallen into the black hole of Apple brokenness.

Ankush Narula wrote:

This problem is now affecting the TV app on my Apple TV 4K. I navigate to the Library tab and the wheel spins for a few minutes before returning the message “You haven’t purchased any TV Shows or Movies”. Search, Browsing, and Up Next work fine - showing items previously purchased as playable. I can also still open the old iTunes Movies and TV Shows apps to browse my purchases library.

So now the TV app’s Library tab only works in iOS for me now - and fails on macOS and tvOS.

//:0

https://discussions.apple.com/content/attachment/e814c7c0-b28e-4c6a-8309-efd8c2bcff88

This may be unrelated, but I'm hoping that it's evidence of engineering effort being applied to the iTunes movie ecosystem ...

I updated my iPhone 7 Plus and my iPad Pro 12.9 2017 to iOS 13.3 and iPadOS 13.3 yesterday. Playing with the TV app on those platforms, the behavior of the library display is dramatically improved. Before, a great many movie tiles took forever to update and even after one page was fully updated you could scroll away and once again be looking at empty image tiles for minutes, though the movie names would draw.

In 13.3, there was a long pause the first time I looked at my movie library, while (presumably) some kind of preloading was going on. Then every tile drew. Scrolling slowly downward shows a continuous stream of fully drawn tiles and a fast flip displays empty boxes for a fraction of a second and then the images are drawn. I never see empty boxes for more than instant.

Honestly, this is the best I have ever seen this behave. I remember praising the excellent scrolling behavior of the iPad TV app a long time ago, but it hasn't been good for many months. Today, it is excellent again. That's nice!

No change in behavior in tvOS 13.2, which I also updated yesterday ... the library still says that I haven't purchased anything. And macOS 10.15.2 also does not fix anything ... the TV app still does not show my library.

I hope the fixes come soon. But I welcome improvements to the iOS and iPadOS apps.

Ok, this is a happy update ... iTunes on Windows is working now.

I retested after posting the above update, and iTunes on Windows 10 seemed to be exactly as it has been for a while. I tried logging out of the iTunes Store and then logging back in and saw the same failure indication in the caption bar, something about "Unable to access your purchases, click retry to try again".

I just left it sitting there and did not do anything else. And then it populated.

It certainly seems like something got fixed on the server side. I guess I need to retest the Apple TV 4K some more, and try logging out and back in, then leave it sitting on the Library tab for a long time. Maybe it will be working as well ... that would be nice!