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

Anybody home Apple? My new Apple TV is a dud! Got the whole family gathered for a movie. 2 hrs later we went to bed and I felt like an ***. It only had 5 hrs more to go.... Should have rented from Blockbuster... Can't believe I said that. Photo slide show ***** too. Random means the same hundred or two pictures over and over. Not so random. It does'nt really "stream" does it? Cache's a couple hundred photos and plays them over and over.

How embarrassing this product is. Should have went with the Western Digital Live Hub.

I've read many of these postings, thus far. Ready to watch a rental in four hours? Five hours? Sounds like lightning speed compared to my 15 and 20 hour wait times. **APPLE - PLEASE DO SOMETHING!!!!** Other companies would envy the sales figures on this product alone. It would be worth the investment to kick this product into high gear. This is the first time I've ever been disappointed in an Apple purchase. Embarrassing for the mighty Apple, indeed.

Man, there are a ton of threads in this forum complaining about the download problems. Unbelievable! I feel your pain everyone! My ATV2 has become so frustrating that I took it back to the store yesterday and they exchanged it. No difference in performance with the new one as I suspected.

We've put our original ATV back in service for now and it seems to be working fine, just like it always did for the last two years. As a safety, we now download movies during the week in off hours and just store them to the hard drive until we're ready to watch them. That pretty much guarantees trouble free movie watching and at least the original ATV gives me that option as it actually has storage capabilities. It'll hold a movie for up to 30 days if the movie hasn't been started.

I spoke with an Apple tech a couple of days ago who was absolutely rude and he says he gets over 20 calls a day about this issue and that it's an overloaded iTunes server issue and nothing he can do about it. Then he tells me I should be contacting iTunes. Hello! I called Apple! Sigh.....

This is my first lousy Apple experience too. Oh well, at least in Canada I've been able to rent movies on our PS3 from Sony in HD for the same price and same quality without problems. After over 2 years of giving Apple a LOT of money for movie rentals we're now spreading it around and giving some business to Sony. I don't like Sony's interface but at least their service works as advertised.

On a side note, I hope everyone is at least doing the speed test available in the ATV firmware and submitting the results to Apple? That should help to at least get Apple some data so they can try and figure out where the problem is. Cheers!

I'm seriously unhappy after going out and buying Apple TV today and an HDMI IWire totalling £119 for my daughter

First (non HD) movie has stopped half way through and the message says ready to play in 1hr 27 mins. Why?

Checked Broadband connection and speed which are both peak perfect, googled the problem and to my disappointment find out that everyone here is experiencing the same or in many cases much worse

"Rent and Instantly watch Movies?" Says it on the box and they tell you it in the Apple store ..... MISLEADING!

I was sold this under the belief if i wanted a movie rental it would save me a trip to the store NOT that i had to plan hours in advance if i might want to watch one hours later

Apple TV rentals = fail.

Dad just got one for xmas. couldn't find a netflix movie for streaming (has never failed yet - instant streaming 100% of the time with netflix), so decided to go for the iTunes HD rental. said would be available for play in 1 hours 20 minutes. well, came back over an hour later - selected the same movie, now says 1 hour and 10 minutes! useless. totally useless.

secondly, iTunes is now an on-demand service. it needs to have 24-hour telephone support. not email support with a 48 hour response time.

"That’s perfect for those spontaneous movie nights" - " Once you find what you’re looking for, simply press Play, and in seconds, you’re watching the opening credits with theater-like Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound." - BS. absolute BS!

I'm having the same problem in Canada with good wireless connection, Netflix downloading almost instantly. Apple TV reporting our HD movie will be ready for watching in 5 hours and 43 minutes (except occasionally when it reports it will be longer). Went to bed without a movie. Quite a disappointing experience for an Apple product.

Best to send feedback to Apple on this pervasive problem:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/appletv.html

I've been having a series of problems with my ATV2, and they all appear to be related to my ISP speed.

Here goes:
1) When watching an HD movie, it pauses to download additional content - even when my ISP speed is consistently above the recommended 3mbps. However, when it does download additional content the ATV2 does not allow me to hit play to watch, it demands and locks me into waiting another 32 hours, 232 hours, etc. Occasionally the movie will play in 15-20 minutes if I leave the unit alone.
2) To combat this problem, I press menu to regain control of the unit.
3) I hit play and get the same message, or the movie begins playing instantly. It's like a 50/50 chance of what will happen.

The above will also happen if I pause a movie and hit play again, even if there appears to be sufficient downloaded content in the scrubber.

My ISP is offering a free month of (up to) 30mbps, with a 15mbps guaranteed minimum. After upgrading to this speed level the above problems have been resolved. I no longer have buffering issues, and movies pause, play, pause, play within seconds. It is clear that the ATV2 does not work well with lower speed Internet connections. I wish I knew that before buying the unit...because paying more for my Internet each month would have gone into my purchase decision for ATV2. Hopefully Apple can work out the kinks with the lower speed Internet connections in the 3mbps to 15mbps range I was previously in. A significant portion of the population does not have the option to upgrade to 20mbps+ speed. I'm lucky. Unfortunately, the increased speed requirement will eat into my iTunes download budget.

Other troubleshooting prior to the ISP speed upgrade involved:
1) Checking for Wi-Fi interference, changing the channel
2) Direct connection to Ethernet to bypass Wi-Fi
3) Many, many speed tests when experiencing problems (results above 3mbps 90% of the time)
4) Factory reset of ATV2
5) Different HDMI and ethernet cords
6) Shutting off iPhone and MacBook Pro (hey, you never know...)
7) Hours on the phone with Apple Support (thank you)

Could it be that my ISP is dynamically throttling my connection in order to force an upgrade to a higher service level? It is strange to me that I receive such a disparity in service now, when in the past before buying the ATV2 I received almost a constant 10mbps+ service, regardless of the time of day. Makes one wonder...

geoffand - there is a statement by Apple that you need over 2mbps for uninteruppted SD movies and over 6Mbps fror HD in Apple TV Troubleshooting

The whole Apple TV is Apple's white elephant. Its a disgrace, it does not work and nowhere does it mention on the box nor does anyone in the store tell you that you even need a minimum ISP speed anyway

Customers are led to belive that if you have broadband thats it

You need minimum 5-6mbps for uninterrupted HD streaming period, it's not only related to apple tv. If you research you will find out what speed you should have before purchasing any streaming device.

Interesting. I wish I would have researched Apple TV a bit more before purchasing yesterday. I had no idea that so many people were experiencing the same thing. I have been waiting for 3 hours to watch a movie I rented from iTunes. I do not have this problem with the unit when streaming from Netflix, so I don't get it. Is it a hardware issue or something with downloads coming from the iTunes rental store? This is the first bad experience I have had with Apple and I own pretty much everything else in each of their product lines. I will be bringing this unit back unless Apple clearly shows they are on top of this. Unfortunately I don't have much hope here as this issue seems to have been going on since 2008!!

I'm adding my voice to this debacle. I've got the new Apple TV2 and download speeds are $hit. My network speed are up to snuff. I'm streaming Netflix without a problem. Renting movies in both HD & SD. This is one of the worst Apple services/devices I've seen them make.

What solutions are there for this?

Antonio

I agree, Apple could have done a much better job with stating what minimum ISP speed is required for certain downloads. It does not mention ISP speed on the ATV2 webpage in the technical specifications, which is the first place I went to look when I started having problems. When I bought the unit I was under the impression a high speed Internet connection would do, and that the ATV2 would buffer with some predictability if your speed was not up to snuff. This was not my experience, as 232 hours is more than my allotted time for viewing an already downloaded and played program. It was saying I had to wait 232 hours before playback could start, meanwhile there was content downloaded in the scrubber (at least another 10 minutes of playback) and a speedtest of the connection at the time consistently came back at 6.5 - 8 mbps.

It is pretty clear there may be a bug in the software that is not interpreting download speed / connections properly, resulting in an erroneous playback timing message. A ridiculously fast and pricey Internet speed (for a residential user) seems to correct this issue.

We bought ATV1 off the bat all those years ago and it worked pretty much flawlessly... now we have ATV2 and it's crap, so much so that we have given up on it and I'm glad to say we kept the original unit.

I can A/B our 2 ATV units, switching over the HDMI input on the TV and where we get almost instant start on ATV1, we have to wait hours for ATV2 to download... or it starts and then stops a few minutes in, normally around the 17 minute mark?

It's been reduced to a Netflix box in our house (which works fine as it's mostly SD) while our old original ATV unit works just as it always has.

Look on ebay for a cheap ATV1... and stay clear of the ATV2.

Mal

Add me to the list. Two weekend nights totally wasted waiting for an Inception rental to download. Infuriating.

Old Apple TV did not have this problem.

I too would like to share my disappointment in the ATV2. I was an early adopter of the original ATV and thought it was a tremendous product (even if most did not agree with me). I was excited to get the ATV2 because of the added Netflix functionality, but it has not been a good experience thus far. Not once had I had to wait more than five minutes to view a rented movie on the first ATV (including HD). In one week with the ATV2 I have had to wait on multiple movies. My experience has not been as bad as some of the others on this forum but it is disappointing nonetheless. It is interesting to me that my old ATV had no issue streaming iTunes content on my network, while it seems to be an issue on the ATV2.

It seems clear that this is an Apple problem, plain and simple. I can rent movies on the old ATV and stream movies via Netflix on the ATV2. That tells me that the issue is probably a flaw from their end.

Its just frustrating to be a loyal customer and get let down like this. I guess I can't assume Apple develops the best quality products anymore.