Vodafone recently updated its television platform, making it incompatible for computers with the macOS operating system. Something that, until recently, Vodafone TV users could enjoy.
Now, if you try to connect to Vodafone TV (previously called ‘vodafonetvonline’) from any browser (Safari, Firefox, Chrome…), the following message appears:
Failed to load account settings. Please try again later. (WF004)
After contacting the technical support of Vodafone TV, they could not, to this day, give me an explanation beyond that they had updated their platform and that it was incompatible.
Compatible devices to watch Vodafone TV
As of today, you can only enjoy Vodafone TV without a decoder on the following devices according to the information on its website:
- Samsung smart TV models (from 2017).
- Sony, Philips, Xiaomi and TCL smart TV models with Android TV.
- LG smart TV models (from 2020) with webOS 5.0 or higher operating system.
- Check that your smart TV is compatible with the Vodafone TV App.
- Mobile / Android Tablet.
- iPhone/iPad
- Windows PC laptop and Windows PC connected via HDMI to an external monitor.
- Amazon Fire TV devices.
- xiaomi mi BOX
- Chromecast
As you can see in the list, within the Apple ecosystem, it is only compatible with the iPhone and iPad. If before it had the handicap of not being available on Apple TV, now it turns out that it is not available for macOS either.
Trick to watch Vodafone TV on a Mac
Those of us who are dedicated to web development tend to use browsers with development tools. For this reason, I leave you a trick to “skip” this restriction, making it possible for us to watch Vodafone TV on a Mac. And everything happens by changing the “user agent”.
How to change the user agent in Safari
We are going to carry out this simple configuration from the macOS browser itself: Safari.
- We open Safari
- Click on the Safarimenu and then on “ Preferences… ”
- We look for “Advanced” in the upper buttons (the last one on the right) and activate the option at the bottom “Show the Development menu in the menu bar”
- Then we go to “Development” and choose the user agent that we want to emulate in Windows: Chrome or Firefox:
- Development > User Agent > Google Chrome – Windows
- Development > User Agent > Firefox – Windows
- Now we will be able to put tv.vodafone.es in our browser and we will be able to watch our operator’s TV in the Safari browser.
Let’s hope that soon it will be available again for Mac without having to change the user agent, and of course, they will also launch the app for Apple TV.