Amazon Fire TV Licence Error
I recently picked up an Amazon Fire TV Stick; seeing as I have a Prime account, it seemed like a reasonable plan to make the most of it. However, I hit upon a problem pretty much immediately. After successfully registering, I first noticed that there was no sign of the BBC iPlayer app. Then I realised that any film or TV show I tried to watch would fail miserably with a deeply unhelpful ‘LICENSE_ERROR’ message.
I contacted Amazon and received a canned response describing something that wasn’t quite my issue, but reassured me that other people had reported it, they were working on it, but they couldn’t give me an estimated time for fixing it. Great. I know when a company is kindly telling me not to hold my breath for help.
Solution
This evening, the penny dropped. All of the prices for paid content were being shown in dollars instead of pounds sterling. Obviously something about my account was being American and I was being blocked from the US content when I tried to play it. If you’re also having this issue, head over to this link:
With any luck you should see a box just under the Amazon banner telling you that your Kindle account can be moved over to amazon.co.uk from amazon.com. Now, I had no idea that I had an amazon.com Kindle account; I don’t own a Kindle and it’s not obvious that the Kindle store and the Prime system are tied together. But it would appear that they are.
Go through the steps on the site to shuffle your Kindle account over to amazon.co.uk, which basically amounts to clicking the prompts. Then you will need to go back to your Fire TV and navigate through the menu to Settings > My Account. Click your account name and choose the Deregister option.
You’ll be prompted to sign in or create a new account; just sign back in with your usual Amazon account details and with any luck you should see totally different content, prices in pounds sterling and your Prime Instant Video content should actually work!