Your first evening: what to do, in the order worth doing it
A calm run through the first hour with a new subscription, from the email landing to the moment you stop fiddling and actually watch something.
Start on your phone, not on the telly
Open your account page on your phone before you touch the television. Everything you are about to need is on that one screen: the server address, the username, the password, and a copy button beside each of them. Having it in your hand means you are reading from the real thing rather than from memory or from a photograph of an email.
It also settles the first question people ask us, which is whether the order actually went through. If your details are showing in your account, it did. Nothing else needs checking.
Set up one device and stop there
The temptation is to do the living room, the bedroom and the tablet all in one go while you are in the mood. Resist it. Get one device working properly first, ideally the main telly, because that is the one that has to be right.
If something goes wrong on the second device later, you already know your subscription is fine, and the problem has to be that device. Setting up three at once and having two fail tells you almost nothing about why.
Type slowly, or paste if you possibly can
The single most common reason a first login fails is a mistyped character on a remote control. A lowercase letter that should be uppercase. A missing colon. The http at the front left off because it did not look important.
Where a device lets you paste, paste. Where it does not, read each line back before you move to the next box. It feels slow and it saves the evening.
Let the first load finish
When you sign in for the first time, the app downloads the entire channel list and the programme guide behind the scenes. The screen can look frozen while it does this. It is not frozen. It is working.
Leave it alone. Force-closing the app half way through is what leaves people with an empty list and the impression that nothing works. Every load after the first is quick.
Then spend ten minutes making it yours
Once your list is there, do the boring bit while you have the energy. Mark your regular channels as favourites. Move your own groups to the top. Turn on whatever the app calls remembering your last quality setting.
This is the difference between a subscription that feels like a tool and one that feels like your telly. It is worth doing once, properly, on the first night.
If you are stuck, tell us what you are watching on
Message us from the messages tab in your account and say which device you are on. That single detail changes what we send back, because the fix for a Fire Stick is a different fix from the one for a MAG box, and guessing wastes your evening rather than ours.
There is no wrong question on the first night. Everybody who works here has set one of these up for a relative over the phone.
Did that not do it?
Tell us what you are watching on and what the screen is doing, and a person will work through the rest with you. You do not need to know the right words for any of it.
Message a person