The past few days my ATV has been taking 7-14 hours to download movies, when it used to take less than a minute to get it to start playing. I'm starting to regret not stopping by the video store yesterday...
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I'm seeing this as well. Until recently it only took 90 seconds at most to begin playback of an HD rental. Now it says 2 hours then 6 hours then 4 hours... Ultimately once it says I'm good to start it will stop every 5 minutes or so and need to catch up. I downloaded a film last night and gave up about 15 minutes into it. If this AppleTV was new I'd be bringing it back for a refund. However since I know it has been capable of quick downloads with my internet connection in the pas I wonder what on Apple's end has changed?
clemdog wrote:
since I know it has been capable of quick downloads with my internet connection in the pas I wonder what on Apple's end has changed?
Maybe more people home for the holidays renting from iTunes is overloading their servers.
I'm glad to see/hear that people can download a HD movie in 30 minutes. If you hadn't posted this, I would have thought that it takes 4 to 8 hours....like it has since yesterday. I sure hope the servers speed up soon. I'm going to give it 30 days and if there is no improvement, I'm taking it back!!
+"I'm glad to see/hear that people can download a HD movie in 30 minutes."+
I usually initiate a HD rental and can begin watching uninterupted in 60 - 90 seconds... This need to wait hours or worse case, the next day is a pain.
I usually initiate a HD rental and can begin watching uninterupted in 60 - 90 seconds... This need to wait hours or worse case, the next day is a pain.
It has taken 7 hours to download a movie and on top of that it is takng over an hour to sync to ATV. Is there hope or is everyone returning the APTV??
I have been noticing this in the past few days with my Apple TV.
I use 802.11/n Wi-Fi to connect my Apple TV to the internet, and have found that HD TV shows, Movies, and Trailers take much much longer to load and begin playing than they usually do. SD TV shows, Movies, and Trailers still load almost instantly, and play almost instantly.
I use 802.11/n Wi-Fi to connect my Apple TV to the internet, and have found that HD TV shows, Movies, and Trailers take much much longer to load and begin playing than they usually do. SD TV shows, Movies, and Trailers still load almost instantly, and play almost instantly.
I had this problem last night after I hooked up my ATV for the first time. The movie downloaded 51% and then just stopped. I stopped the movie to load the update thinking maybe that was the problem, but when I went back in it was gone. We only watched half of the movie and then poof, gone. I agree that it's probably just an overload on Apple's servers, but I'm wondering if we have any recourse? Has anyone ever received a refund for this type of thing from Apple? I hate to pay $4.99 for half of the movie.
I don't know to what degree this might "help", but renting video to my Xbox 360 takes literally 5 HOURS longer than it used to this last few weeks...
Maybe a lot more people are home and its taken a toll on the servers?
Maybe a lot more people are home and its taken a toll on the servers?
Has anyone had any correspondence with Apple about this issue? Have they acknowledged the problem?
Same thing here (Phoenix). Used to rent via ATV fairly often and the longest we had to wait before watching (HD) rentals was 5 minutes and 1-2 minutes was typical. It's probably been 5 or 6 weeks since we last rented something but I have noticed that HD movie trailers have taken a long time to buffer before playing off-and-on for the past few weeks but I thought it was just my connection or occasional slowness from the Apple side, assuming they'd prioritize bandwidth for things like rentals and purchases which might affect trailers.
Then last night (after our new baby went off to sleep early) we decided to rent a movie and it's initial estimate was 4 hours until it was "ready to watch" but that fairly quickly dropped to an hour. Decided to give it the benefit of the doubt and watch a half hour TV show and then see where it was and noticed that whenever we watched anything else (even already downloaded and synced to the ATV) the rental download would stop. The ATV is hard-wired and I have an ethernet switch where I can see it so I can easily tell when data is being transferred and it stopped within a few seconds of playing anything else and wouldn't start again on its own. Whenever we went back to the "Rented Movies" it showed the status as "Waiting to download" and I could restart it manually and it would keep, slowly, downloading so long as we didn't watch anything else on the ATV (though trailers didn't seem to affect it). By the time we went to bed 3 hours later the download was at only 51%. This morning it shows that the DL is complete, but who knows if we'll get around to watching it now.
We were really hoping to watch the movie, so I had also tried resetting the ATV, my router, and the modem just to be safe. I also ran a few tests and my internet connection could consistently maintain 15-20Mbps down and 3-4Mbps up (with actual downloads as well as with various speed test sites), so the problem definitely seems to be on the Apple side of things.
I seriously doubt that we'll rent anything else on ATV until we see that this problem has been acknowledged and addressed by Apple. Too bad, too, as we found the service to be very convenient even though it was a little pricey, but now the video store 3 miles away is once again a better value. :-/
Then last night (after our new baby went off to sleep early) we decided to rent a movie and it's initial estimate was 4 hours until it was "ready to watch" but that fairly quickly dropped to an hour. Decided to give it the benefit of the doubt and watch a half hour TV show and then see where it was and noticed that whenever we watched anything else (even already downloaded and synced to the ATV) the rental download would stop. The ATV is hard-wired and I have an ethernet switch where I can see it so I can easily tell when data is being transferred and it stopped within a few seconds of playing anything else and wouldn't start again on its own. Whenever we went back to the "Rented Movies" it showed the status as "Waiting to download" and I could restart it manually and it would keep, slowly, downloading so long as we didn't watch anything else on the ATV (though trailers didn't seem to affect it). By the time we went to bed 3 hours later the download was at only 51%. This morning it shows that the DL is complete, but who knows if we'll get around to watching it now.
We were really hoping to watch the movie, so I had also tried resetting the ATV, my router, and the modem just to be safe. I also ran a few tests and my internet connection could consistently maintain 15-20Mbps down and 3-4Mbps up (with actual downloads as well as with various speed test sites), so the problem definitely seems to be on the Apple side of things.
I seriously doubt that we'll rent anything else on ATV until we see that this problem has been acknowledged and addressed by Apple. Too bad, too, as we found the service to be very convenient even though it was a little pricey, but now the video store 3 miles away is once again a better value. :-/
Yes. You can "Report A Problem" from your iTunes download history. You'll find the movie you rented, click on it, and then report the problem and ask for a refund. In my case, I asked them to reset the rental so I could watch it again within 30 days. The very next day I got a response from Apple with a link to re-download the movie!!
I was having the same problems reported above the day after Xmas. But now the downloads are super fast! Case solved. I just downloaded a movie and it took only 20 minutes to finish 100%.
Last night I checked the downloads menu and it said that I had the movie waiting to be downloaded. It did seem to load much faster too. I'm sure that it was just a saturation problem on Apple's servers. I did try to report a problem on 12/26 via my Apple iTunes account, but when I would click "Report Problem" the button would just disappear and that was it.
I'm having the same problem - extremely slow to completely stalled downloading. How do you "report a problem" with downloads? I've been looking and can't find the button or the link or whatever it is.
I had the same issue last night as well. HD Movies usually start within a minute but had to give up lsst night. ATV kept reporting between 7-10 hours before movie could be watched. Hopefully just a short term server issue.
Anyone else having slow HD downloads?