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Anyone else having slow HD downloads?

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...

Posted on Dec 25, 2008 10:42 PM

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342 replies

Dec 26, 2008 1:51 PM in response to Kerry Key

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?

Dec 26, 2008 9:31 PM in response to Kerry Key

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.

Dec 27, 2008 10:30 AM in response to Kerry Key

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.

Dec 28, 2008 1:03 PM in response to clemdog

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. :-/

Dec 28, 2008 2:45 PM in response to jkgetz

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!!

Dec 28, 2008 3:02 PM in response to jkgetz

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.

Anyone else having slow HD downloads?

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