Apple TV taking a long time to download an iTunes Store movie rental

Thanks for the istumbler advice. My signal strength in this room is only at 32% with 14% noise and there are 15 networks causing interference, 5 of which have stronger signals than my own POS 2WIRE device.

I've never experienced any issues with my Apple TV in this room (bedroom) or my living room until this most recent update.

In my bedroom my download speeds on iTunes are always over 1mbp/s and I have never had trouble streaming an HD movie from the iTunes Store with no wait at all and I know the same area networks have been around me.

What can I do to clear up some of this interference and/or boost the signal from my uverse 2WIRE setup to take advantage of the 15 Mbps I'm paying for?

Where is the device in relation to the router? Try moving ATV. Make sure there aren't too many wifi enabled devices in the same area. Make sure router is up to date, check manual on how to tweak settings and change bands etc. Do you have encryption setup on your network?

This is a problem with the Apple iTunes server! It has nothing to do with too many devices competing for bandwidth (as you can quickly demonstrate by turning them all off). It has nothing to do with your internet provider (as you can quickly demonstrate by streaming something from You Tube). This is too much traffic on iTunes, as evidenced by the fact that it happens most of all during prime time, when everyone is streaming. Using an internet cable makes absolutely no difference, therefore it is not a Wi Fi issue. Netflix doesn't have this problem. It's just lousy work on Apple's part.

Have the same problem. I have been using Apple TV for over a year. Just did the latest update and now instead of being able to start watching a movie in a few minutes, we now get a message saying it will be ready in 10+ hours. Verified that Internet speed remains unchanged. What the ****! If this doesn't get fixed, we'll be dumping our Apple TV and using a alternative solution.

I completely agree with this being on Apple's end. For the last year (at least) if I try to rent a movie on Apple TV (version 2), it says it will be ready in 9+ hours. I can immediately go to my internet provider cable box (Xfinity) and rent and watch the same movie immediately (and in HD no less!). I can also immediately go to my Playstation and rent and watch the same movie immediately (either via playstation store OR netflix). All connections in my house are gigabit ethernet (wired). Anyone that argues it is an "internet" or "internet provider" problem has no clue (at least in my case). Stopped using Apple TV altogether for movie rental.

Just rented Star Trek - 26 hours and 28 minutes to download!!!!! That means after I go to bed tomorrow night I can watch it. It worked just fine 3 nights ago with The Lone Ranger.

After over a year of using Apple TV (and loving it!) I now have to wait an hour to an hour and a half to watch a tv show or a movie that previously was playing instantly! Nothing has changed in the house, connection, or position of anything. Just happening in the last 2 weeks. Very frustrating!

I'm experiencing the same thing. Our ATV was working great! We would rent a movie and begin streaming five minutes later. Now, since the last ATV update, we are told 22+ hours for any movie we rent. It will eventually start, but continually buffers throughout the movie. I'm really disappointed that Apple hasn't responded to this issue. I would think this would be an important source of revenue for the company.

Update for me:

I was using iTunes on a Mac and storing (and accessing) my iTunes Media folder on a QNAP NAS (network attached storage) device. I bought a 4TB external disk drive and moved my iTunes Media folder to it (attached to the Mac Mini). That instantly fixed my "delayed media rental" problem. It may not apply to everyone, but if you are saving your iTunes Media folder on a NAS, you may need to move it to an external drive (or the Mac) to fix the rental delay problem. YMMV and I hope this helps someone.

I have tried everything, and nothing made the downloads faster. Downloaded the same movie from another service (also in HD) immediately after the last failed iTunes download. That download worked and worked quickly.

I guess that means at least for me it was an Apple-side issue.

ISPs could be throttling traffic from Apple's streaming servers. I swear that my ISP throttles YouTube traffic during peak times because anything else I try to stream or download from works just fine. YouTube works great for me during non-peak times, but then buffers like crazy during peak hours and I have a 30Mbps down/5Mbps up connection.

As it relates specifically to ATV, I just got a refurbished 3rd gen this week and couldn't be happier thus far. I just finished streaming my first movie rental (Pacific Rim) in 1080p without any issues. I thought for sure there would be a lot of buffering or that I would have to wait at least 30 minutes or more for it to preload, but nope, I was able to start watching within a couple of minutes if that. I must say that the image quality was quite good as well, certainly much better than my experience with Amazon's streaming service.

My wife and I have been dealing with this for the past few weeks. I'm absolutely done with Apple TV content. It takes her nearly 3 hours to watch a 1 hour program with constant interruptions... in STANDARD DEFINITION!!! The woman has much more patience than I do for this sort of thing but even she has reached her limit dealing with totally unacceptable and unreasonable download times. I'm reading good things about Amazon video on-demand. The next purchase we make will be from there via the Sony PlayStation 4. It can't possibly be worse than this. If all goes well, I will retire Apple TV permanently as a device for delivery of streaming content.

What a farce! First time renting from Apple and it reckon it'll take 200 hours to buffer. Really? I stream from netflix, iplayer etc all the time and I've never seen this happen. What a joke, get a grip apple this is far from being good enough :(

Agreed. Guess this is the last movie I rent from Apple on iTunes. As someone who defends Mac, I'm sorely disappointed.

Renting movies from Apple TV is a terrible experience for me. Way too slow . Hard to believe that Apple is resting its future on this product.