It’s launch day for Paramount+ and while we’d love to tell existing CBS All Access subscribers that it’s a smooth transition, well, that was not the case.
As with too many things today, new customers are treated better than existing customers (see: Poor Technical Execution: Paramount+ LIMITED TIME OFFER 50% Discount for CBS All Access Customers).
When you visit Roku Smart TV channel lineup, the CBS All Access icon is gone and you must now sign in anew. The problem is the login points to CBS.com not paramountplus.com. So the activation codes for the TV don’t work.
This sent us back to the computer where our paramountplus.com account was functional.
We can sign into our paramountplus.com account and see the new paramount+ content there (Spongebob: Sponge on the Run, namely), but when we try to activate this perfectly working account on Roku it tells us to go to cbs.com and activate. When we go there, it doesn’t recognize the paramountplus.com account email.
Confused? Of course you are! So are we. CBS had months to get this figured out — work out how the transition process would work and it is one hot tech mess. I’m a tech-savvy customer and having problems, that means people who aren’t are going to be lighting up their 1-800 customer support line wanting to get their “automatically updated” CBS All Access now Paramount+ account working on their Roku-powered smart TVs — and not able to.
Looks like an app update will be coming soon.
Oh, and our Paramount+ login that works fine on the computer doesn’t work at all on the Roku. My guess is that it’s looking for a Roku account setup for Paramount+ and not an account that was activated through the computer. But, like I said above, everything points to cbs.com which seems to not have migrated the pre-launch existing paramountplus accounts. They didn’t even recognize our email as having an account. When I signed up with the same email address as our paramount+ account — it created a brand new FREE account. Sigh.
Guess for the time being if we want to watch anything from Paramount+ it will have to be on the computer?! Maybe I can get it to work on the phone and cast it to TV that way … a workaround, yes, but at least providing some way to watch Paramount+ on our TV.
HEY, THEY FIXED IT!
Tried again an hour later — after writing this post and tweeting my initial frustration (see here) — and the Roku smart TV app now properly points to paramountplus.com. We were finally able to make it all work. Those of you who don’t wake up first thing in the morning for these things will have missed the excitement.
This is the pain of being on the bleeding edge of anything. Kudos to the Paramount+ engineers that quickly noticed the problem and/or saw existing early riser customers were having these issues and fixed it! Thank you.
Off to check out what’s new …
Movies, Movies, Movies 