Wrong email address for renting movies on Apple TV box

[DaveWT]

At times I am led to believe I am "loosing it". (or has Apple moved the furniture again and I am bumping into their new locations?)

Preamble: I have two AppleIDs - yes I know that was a mistake, but I can't go back in time and fix that now. One is a mac.com address and the other is an outlook.com address. This latter one was formerly a hotmail.com address and a long long time ago I went through all the steps (I thought) to change it to the outlook.com address.

More recently: We occasionally rent movies via the Movies app on our Apple TV box.



In the past, completing the rental seemed easy and I would put in my password when prompted and it would just get on with it. In more recent times the procedure seems to have changed (tvOS updates perhaps?) and we are now faced with an unfamiliar screen.)



Trying the first box (Confirm with Apple Device) never seems to work so we choose the second box - Confirm with Password. This takes us to a new screen:



Notice it has thrown up the old hotmail.com address. Oddly, a few weeks ago we managed to rent a movie at this point without this problem showing up. So I go to Settings on the Apple TV box and find it is suggesting the correct outlook.com address for the rentals etc.



So I have been hunting high and low to find out where it is getting this old hotmail.com address. I went to https://appleid.apple.com/ and logged into my mac.com AppleID and found that I had the hotmail.com email address listed as an alternate contact so fixed that and thought I was done. But NO!

Then I found my home sharing settings were still using the old hotmail.com address so signed out of that on my iMac and my Apple TV and set up home sharing again on both devices with the proper outlook.com address and thought I was done. But NO!

So, if anyone is still following this mess, can you suggest where else that dang nabbed hotmail.com address may be lurking?

 

[chas_m]

Tricky! You might try signing in to your outlook.com account and see if the hotmail.com is still listed as an alias. Also make sure family sharing is off, if it was ever on.

We have been seeing people get tripped up by old email addresses that are still somehow in Apple’s system which the users can no longer access. I’m hoping that Apple will eventually come up with a way to fully purge any bad info out of their records.

(this is going to be SUCH a nightmare for people using their @shaw.ca email address as their Apple ID, but never mind that for now.)

 

[DaveWT]

Tricky! You might try signing in to your outlook.com account and see if the hotmail.com is still listed as an alias. Also make sure family sharing is off, if it was ever on.

You were spot on. I had the hotmail version as an alias to the outlook version in my profile on outlook.com. I removed that and just went through the steps to (almost) rent a movie and now it is telling me to enter the outlook variant in settings. Not sure why it wants me to do that step as the outlook version is the one already in settings, but the next time I really want to rent a movie I will humour it and enter it one more time.

As to your family sharing suggestion, I haven't investigated that (yet) but don't understand why that would cause a problem. What if I want to use family sharing?

Thanks so much for the answer. It wasn't a critical issue, but one that was certainly bugging me.

 

[chas_m]

As to your family sharing suggestion, I haven't investigated that (yet) but don't understand why that would cause a problem. What if I want to use family sharing?

I should have been clearer there. What I meant was “while you are in the process of resolving this issue, make sure Family Sharing is off so that those you are sharing to don’t run into the same issue.” Once you’ve got things working to your satisfaction, Family Sharing can be turned back on.

 

[DaveWT]

I should have been clearer there. What I meant was “while you are in the process of resolving this issue, make sure Family Sharing is off so that those you are sharing to don’t run into the same issue.” Once you’ve got things working to your satisfaction, Family Sharing can be turned back on.

Thanks for the clarification.