Extreme problems with sharing!!!

[Desuth]

Please follow along with how things happened.

Last year Friends-A invited me to share their VUDU library. I accepted and sent them an invitation back so they could see mine. This seemed to have worked, except I could only see movies they purchased going forward from the invitation, none that were already in their library. I thought, however, that this was how it worked, and we have had no other problems with this.

Several months ago, I invited Friend-B to share my library. This would be only my 2nd out of 5 shares. She accepted and invited me in return to hers. However, it would not let me use my existing UV Library name. So I created a new one for her invitations. I found at that time, I already had TWO UV Libraries, so this made THREE. One only had two old movies that were part of my signup to the now-defunct Target Ticket. When I went online, I only saw one of the libraries and nothing from the other 2. Then I saw there was an option to merge libraries, and I did it. Success (I thought at the time) -- I could now see all my movies from the 2 libraries plus the movies from the Friends-A and Friend-B libraries!

Yesterday, I got a frantic call from Friends-A. They wanted to add another person to share their VUDU account and were having problems... because *I* was listed as the primary on *their* UV account!! Not only that, but my Friend-B was listed on THEIR UV account, although she is still listed on my *VUDU* as accepting on MINE. They deleted her, and now she has no access to MY movies or theirs (which she previously saw and we thought was weird but it must work that way somehow).

Friends-A wanted me to go in and delete them from sharing. I had to go to UV to do it, and saw that they were a user on my UV account, but not a "full". First I changed them to "full" but then decided to do as they asked and deleted them.

I now have one UV Library with only me as a user. I can still see Friends-A's library under MyVUDU, but haven't heard from them if I am listed as a user on their UV Library. Friend-B does not list me as a user on her UV Library and I cannot see her movies since she was deleted from Friends-A users!

Here is where it gets worse. I cannot invite Friend-B to join mine again as it says she was already invited. She and Friends-A are both listed at the top of my list of shares and marked as "accepted".... but I now have FIVE open spots for invitations below them. I cannot re-invite them although they are not on my account/library anymore. (Which brings up another question -- what if they accidentally deleted their invitation, can I not invite them again?)

So my problems are:
1.) I can't re-invite people who are no longer sharing on UV. How do I delete them now from VUDU, so I can re-invite?
2.) Need full instructions on how to add additional people without adding more libraries, then merging libraries, etc, as that seems to be how some of these problems came into existence.

Could someone from Support please look into all this? If you privately email me, I can give you the email addresses of Friends-A and Friend-B.

Thanks!!

[qazzaq]

Re: Extreme problems with sharing!!!

I'm sure someone can go in to greater detail, but the UV "share my movies" feature does not work the way you might have expected.

Your problem is that you can't share back and forth (ie inviting to each others libraries).

When you invite someone to share, what is happening behind the scenes is the creation of a new UV user in the inviters UV library which links to the invitees vudu account.

The invitee will no longer be linked to their own UV account.

For example, if you invite someone to share your library, and they invite you to share their library, you are each basically switching which UV library your vudu account is connected to.

Because of the way vudu works, a UV movie always remains owned in vudu in addition to the UV license, regardless of a connected UV account.

Due to this, you might initially think it is working differently than it really is, since when you "swapped" you would see all your movies due to owning them in vudu, plus the UV movies of the person who just invited you to their library. At this point, your own UV movies are currently in your own UV account which is not linked to your vudu account.

Keep in mind that purchased UV titles and redeemed UV codes deposit the UV license into whatever UV account is connected to the vudu account at the time of purchase/redemption.

So basically you have a big mess of swapped UV accounts and it will be hard to tell where all of your movies have ended up.

I know this doesn't really answer your questions but it is a start.

Good luck.


Sidenote - UV sharing was a lot simpler before the "share my movies" feature was implemented. You used to just create a user in your UV account for your family member or whoever and have them link it to their vudu account.

[Hjerne]

Re: Extreme problems with sharing!!!

Please follow along with how things happened.

Last year Friends-A invited me to share their VUDU library. I accepted and sent them an invitation back so they could see mine. This seemed to have worked, except I could only see movies they purchased going forward from the invitation, none that were already in their library. I thought, however, that this was how it worked, and we have had no other problems with this.

Several months ago, I invited Friend-B to share my library. This would be only my 2nd out of 5 shares. She accepted and invited me in return to hers. However, it would not let me use my existing UV Library name. So I created a new one for her invitations. I found at that time, I already had TWO UV Libraries, so this made THREE. One only had two old movies that were part of my signup to the now-defunct Target Ticket. When I went online, I only saw one of the libraries and nothing from the other 2. Then I saw there was an option to merge libraries, and I did it. Success (I thought at the time) -- I could now see all my movies from the 2 libraries plus the movies from the Friends-A and Friend-B libraries!

Yesterday, I got a frantic call from Friends-A. They wanted to add another person to share their VUDU account and were having problems... because *I* was listed as the primary on *their* UV account!! Not only that, but my Friend-B was listed on THEIR UV account, although she is still listed on my *VUDU* as accepting on MINE. They deleted her, and now she has no access to MY movies or theirs (which she previously saw and we thought was weird but it must work that way somehow).

Friends-A wanted me to go in and delete them from sharing. I had to go to UV to do it, and saw that they were a user on my UV account, but not a "full". First I changed them to "full" but then decided to do as they asked and deleted them.

I now have one UV Library with only me as a user. I can still see Friends-A's library under MyVUDU, but haven't heard from them if I am listed as a user on their UV Library. Friend-B does not list me as a user on her UV Library and I cannot see her movies since she was deleted from Friends-A users!

Here is where it gets worse. I cannot invite Friend-B to join mine again as it says she was already invited. She and Friends-A are both listed at the top of my list of shares and marked as "accepted".... but I now have FIVE open spots for invitations below them. I cannot re-invite them although they are not on my account/library anymore. (Which brings up another question -- what if they accidentally deleted their invitation, can I not invite them again?)

So my problems are:
1.) I can't re-invite people who are no longer sharing on UV. How do I delete them now from VUDU, so I can re-invite?
2.) Need full instructions on how to add additional people without adding more libraries, then merging libraries, etc, as that seems to be how some of these problems came into existence.

Could someone from Support please look into all this? If you privately email me, I can give you the email addresses of Friends-A and Friend-B.

Thanks!!

Nobody from support can do anything about this now because what you did had nothing to do with Vudu (which only links to your UV locker) and everything to do with uvvu which is your UV locker.

The merge UV accounts function is intended for a situation where you have accidentally created multiple UV accounts and want to reduce them down to a single account with all the movies collected into that one account. So what happened when you used the merge account function is that you basically stole all your friends UV movies away from them and added them to your own account. Although there is a way to merge accounts there is not a way to divide accounts so now you have two choices. Either you keep all your friends movies by keeping control of the account, or you turn the account over to them and they get to keep all your movies. Either way one of you is going to be losing a lot of valuable property because even if you continue sharing, all of those movies can now only belong to one person.

[Desuth]

Re: Extreme problems with sharing!!!

Well this is just a bunch of problems waiting to happen! First of all, Vudu has a limit of how many times you can link to your UV library, but then one of the two requires you to make a NEW library every time you share! Then UW allows you to merge all those into one, but that means you are stealing other people's movies? I can't even fathom how either of these services allows this to happen!

Luckily the first share was with my daughter and her husband, and they didn't delete me from theirs but had me delete them from mine and it seems to be working okay now, but my other friend was deleted by THEM from their account and I cannot re-invite her on VUDU although she was deleted on UV! She is still listed as invited on MY Vudu.

Such a tangled mess. I won't be sharing with anyone else anymore as it's too complicated now that I know all this. It would work just right if UV would simply give rights to your existing library and not have to make a new one each time. There is no way to switch UV libraries on any of the apps on smartTVs or Roku, etc.