YouTube Age Restriction Content on Roku
You own a Roku SmartTV.
You download the YouTube app onto your RokuTV.
You connect your YouTube account.
You are ready to start streaming videos from YouTube through your TV. You go to watch and one of two things happen. The first is the video glitches out and plays the next video inline. The second thing that happens is you receive an error messages that says; "Something went wrong," "Playback error," or "An error occurred, please try again later." The one I kept getting was “Something went wrong. Log into your Google account and verify your age.”
This would not happen all of the time, but would happen on some videos while never happen on most. It sort of behaves like it is an age restriction thing. However, I never have any issues on any other devices with my YouTube account except on the RokuTV. Videos in my watch later would either glitch out and it would skip the video, playing the next one in the queue or it would give me the playback error message. I’d switch to another account and watch the same video and it would work without any hitches. I go back to my primary account it would do the same thing on those specific videos.
After spending a few hours of looking stuff up on the Roku website forums and YouTube videos on the subject I was able to navigate to what the issue “probably” was. The forums were useless. There was some obvious checks and balances suggested. However, most of the suggestions were dead-ends while others didn’t even make any IT sense. The support staff that would chime in from time to time on the thread was either bot responses, (likely) or customer service agents clearly not reading what is being said and that, is like, tech 101. If they are missing that bad then get help from other areas I say. Me being 25+ years in network admin/IT doesn't really care who is at fault with this. Roku is a device for non-technical people so every help question should not be a thousand word essay on technical aspects about Google/YouTube/Roku written in this "I know more than you" mentality. I did get this fixed; but the forum was not much help.
If you experience this glitch follow these steps. You will not have to factory reset your RokuTV or anything crazy like that. All your troubles are with the YouTube app on the TV and how it was originally installed and signed into:
1) Check age/birthday is fully filled out on your Google account associated to the YouTube account in question. I went ahead and also made my birthday public. I cannot verify whether or not this makes a difference. I did it just to be certain that I could get it working. I know people want to hide their personal information, but many of these apps now require as much data about you as it can so it can tailor your experience. They also do this for advertising purposes, of course, but if you want access to the app and all its features you got to give them access to your behaviors and data. If your correct birthday is already there you can skip this step.
2) Now we need to either Reset and/or Remove the YouTube app on your RokuTV. On your RokuTV, go to the YouTube app. Click settings and click reset app. You can either remove the app and reinstall or just redo the credentials. Resetting the app, basically does this, but I went ahead and did a remove/reinstall of the app just to be certain. It only takes a minute. I only wanted to do this once anyway.
3) Reboot your Roku the proper way. Settings --> System --> Power --> System Restart.
4) Reinstall the YouTube app on your RokuTV.
5) Be sure to sign in with your main/primary YouTube account if you have multiple accounts first. If you have multiple accounts on the same email, which you can do, just make sure your primary is the first/primary account that you sign into. I have 2 accounts on the same email, by which one of them is an old legacy YouTube account. That for me was more than likely the issue on my side of this subject.
6) Once I put back in my credentials with my legacy account as the primary account, which it is, the videos that were being skipped due to age restrictions began to play. I had no more glitches either and it seems fixed for now.
For me, I had the newer account on the TV first and it was a year before I realized I had 2 flippin' YouTube accounts. I did not realize years ago that when you create a Google account, mainly a Gmail account that it automatically creates you a profile for YouTube. My initial YouTube account was setup in 2006 before one had to have a Gmail to use YouTube as an account holder. The settings are radically different since YouTube was purchased by Google later in 2006. Some of the legacy settings from before absolutely do not transfer verbatim from account to account. It is important if one has an older YouTube account that is their main YouTube account, like mine, that you have to pay attention to such things, which I did not at the time. Now I always run into some sort of issue with permissions or sync issues. I have most of this fixed now and wrote a blog about my last Roku/YouTube issue. I keep seeing online that these same issues are not easy to find the specific workarounds to fix these issues. I wrote that blog and this one so that there is something coherent on the INTERNET solving these issues. More specifically to non-tech people. I have found they have the most issues with getting technology to work for them.
Hope this helps people that stumble upon this BLOG. My solutions came from years and years of just tinkering with these devices and understanding how these things work. I mean when you walk into a Wal-Mart and purchase a 50-inch SmartTV for under $300; what do you expect?