Cant activate youtube premium

[ddddddd]

'It looks like you have an active YouTube subscription.' message popping up. Cancelled my original subscription and it expired  16th of september, but message still keep popping up. 

[Samson24]

Thank you for telling me where you're at with this repask and sorry to hear there is still no fix for you. I have also had good help with the social media team and my contact is waiting for the Entertainment Team to look into this.....they seem to take 24 hours to reply to her but this time they have said it will take 5 days to investigate so I have to wait until this Saturday.
This all happened after my new plan with entertainment started (I previously had a one-year contract with inclusive entertainment and had been using YouTube Premium happily for the year before this). Then the YouTube Premium subscription expired 2 days before my plan end date. 
I did get help from a support agent I called and had YouTube Premium working but it only worked for exactly one month so I wonder if this is a one month trial. Currently my YouTube account shows an inactive and expired membership "Provided by Vodafone". I am guessing that this inactive expired membership must be removed before a new subscription can be added but only Vodafone can get this done.

[repask]

That's precisely the process I went through a few months back. I hope you will have better luck with Vodafone after 5 days because I've been waiting ever since.

I, too, have an expired Youtube Premium membership showing in my YouTube account as "Provided by Vodafone". Unfortunately, YouTube support says this is something that Vodafone needs to remove, but the Vodafone team didn't know what to do. Instead, we concentrated on replicating the issue in the first place because the Vodafone Web development team said after 5 days that there wasn't any issue with the Vodafone website and that YouTube Premium activation was working as intended.

This was a bit of a surprise when we could clearly see that it's failing and that existing customers who had YouTube Premium previously on their monthly plan are not able to activate it again.

Please let me know if you get it sorted somehow, as I will be asking Vodafone to do the same for me. Hopefully, they'll work it out, as it shouldn't be too hard. It's their systems, after all.

[Samson24]

Thanks repask, and it seems like this problem has existed for a number of years. I think the oldest post I could find on this subject was back in July 2021.
It also seemed to affect some Prime and Spotify subscriptions that I also found on some posts.
YouTube without Premium is practically unwatchable due to the amount of ads and at the end of the day we have signed up to and are paying for these plans with entertainment. I myself have been with Vodafone since 2009 and I even asked the question about downgrading my plan and I will actually pay for the YTP myself but my contact in the social media team couldn't be more helpful and wants to get to the bottom of this for me.
I'll certainly let you know how I get on if this gets fixed and let you know what was done but best of luck to you in the meantime and hope you get your issue resolved soon too.

[adamccc]

Nice to see others having the same issue - I've spent hours over the last 3 weeks trying to get through to people that there's a fundamental issue. 7 hours over 26 calls, 3 technical conference calls, 2 back office raises (that never respond to you) and only now are the starting to recognise that there's a problem with their service.

Really, really poor that they don't listen to customers when you say there's a bigger issue here than just sending a new entertainment link and trying over and over again. I've said from the beginning, it needs to be sent to the engineering team to check database, api response etc and properly debug this issue - but no one listened.

[Samson24]

Thanks for jumping in adamccc as it does help to know we're not alone with this issue and there are a lot of us going through the same pain.
My support contact who has been a great help has also been really struggling with the Entertainment Team and she keeps chasing them but we are getting nowhere as they are not coming back with any solutions.
So many hours have been wasted on this both by us and the Vodafone employees and to be honest I don't think it is ever going to be sorted. I had hopes with my last chat session on Saturday but again we did not make any progress. It always seems to come back to removing the pass, re-adding the pass, following the offer link and "Oops. Technical error" every time.
I have also tried using other gmail accounts while in incognito mode, etc but it still doesn't work.
Tomorrow I should hear back again from my contact as the Entertainment Team should have replied back to her by then.....but I'm pretty sure they won't have, or won't have a solution.
My thoughts now are to ask to downgrade my sim only plan from Unlimited Max + Entertainment to just Unlimited Max and then use the monthly saving to pay for YTP myself.
I know this doesn't help you or anyone else going through this but just wanted to let you (and everyone else) know where I'm at.

[repask]

You're 100% correct. It needs to go to the development team to troubleshoot why the Vodafone website and YouTube APIs are not working for customers who already have YouTube Premium. It's simply a developer bug that Vodafone needs to resolve so their website doesn't crash whenever someone with a previous YouTube Premium subscription tries to add it.

Knowing how development teams work, I suspect no one in Vodafone is getting high enough to accept this as a bug. Most likely, it's a 3rd party dev team that has delivered this solution, and now they're gone, working on another project, so Vodafone has no one to look into it.

Getting the dev team together and reopening the integration project with Youtube Premium APIs would cost them too much, so they're just kicking the can down the line until we stop complaining. Just my two cents

[Gemma]

Hi everyone, @Samson24 - thanks for your patience while this is being looked into and for your kind words for Jade. If you need anything or an update, then please reply on the chat you've been having with us. 

@adamccc  and @repask - please send us a message over on Social Media and we can get this raised and look into it further. 

[repask]

@Gemma thank you for getting back to us, but I've already contacted the Social Media team a month or more ago and Conor has been most helpful. Now I'm still waiting for a reply from him. He did advise me that he's not sure how far he'll be able to get with it as no one at Vodafone wants to accept this as a website bug, so I'm just patiently waiting to hear back. It's been like this since I upgraded my Vodafone contract in September 2024, and all my add-ons were removed as a result. Since then, I have been unable to re-add my YouTube Premium subscription. All other subscriptions worked just fine.

If you can look into it, that would be appreciated.

Thank you,

Patrik

[Gemma]

Thanks for these details @repask - Please reply back to the last conversation you've had with Conor and then we can check what stage it's at. 

[adamccc]

Still no update after another 5 days passing?