With 13.0 AppleTV 4k is streaming screensavers!? Eating my bandwidth

After turning the TV off at night, the AppleTV doesn't sleep …

You have to put the Apple TV in sleep mode when not in use. Turning off the TV only, may not stop the Apple TV from streaming, e.g. if it was set to a 24/7 streaming app. Streaming video is not inactivity, and then it won’t sleep by itself.

A subset of the available screen savers are locally cached for playback, but they have to be downloaded, in the frequency that you have set. No way that could add up to 500 GB in 6 days.

The streaming previews are short and they repeat. No way that could add up to 500 GB in 6 days.

You haven’t found the culprit yet.

I have done a little more debugging and confirmed that the screensaver IS what was causing the issue. I had the appleTV set to auto sleep after 5 hours last night, and had already disabled the home-screen auto streaming previews. Reviewing the network traffic monitor, the traffic started a few minutes after I shut the TV off, and ran for 5 hours, then stopped. I have now switched to a "photo" screensaver, and the problem is gone. Arial screensaver on, massive bandwidth, Arial screensaver off, nothing.

Clearly it is not doing any caching of the videos, and is just streaming them continuously at this point. Again, it didn't used to do this. I suppose it's possible that I filled too much of the storage with Apps (I tried the demo of Apple Arcade, and put a couple of games on it)... but the behavior of continuously streaming a screensaver at 4k when the storage is getting too full (something there seems to be no way to really check), is certainly what I'd call a bug.

Yes, a good point. I didn't specify. Mine was set to 'weekly' which had no impact at all on the fact that it was burning through bandwidth every night. It was using ~30GB every night over a ~5 hour period after I went to bed, which corresponded to the delay I had set before sleeping. I did one more test: I went into screensavers and started a preview of the aerial screensaver manually. As soon as it started, the network usage from the AppleTV ramped up, and as soon as I stopped it it returned to normal. If it were going to cache them, then one assumes that it would have done it sometime during the hundreds of GB it used over the previous nights.

As of last night, I've confirmed that turning off Aerial screensavers has made the problem go away. It's rather unfortunate, as I quite like them, and having a collection of photos instead is like a downgrade. So, the problem is effectively solved, if in a way I'm not happy with.

Just going to add on to this conversation even though its a few weeks later. I have experienced a similar issue and will be testing it over the next few days by putting it to sleep much faster.. for some reason after the new OS It was set to never sleep and download weekly. I breached my data cap hardcore. The apple tv was streaming all throughout the night when no one was using it. Checking the destination addresses they are all aaplimg.com .

Logs look something like this.. The data is sorted by highest using devices for Oct 29 (today) I also grabbed a reference one from the previous day

http (tcp) AppleTV 17.253.5.204 10 GB Oct 29 04:20:56 11.44 %

http (tcp) AppleTV 17.253.5.207 10 GB Oct 29 04:21:33 11.05 %

http (tcp) AppleTV 17.253.5.202 9 GB Oct 29 04:18:33 9.78 %

http (tcp) AppleTV 17.253.5.206 8 GB Oct 29 04:16:14 9.30 %

http (tcp) AppleTV 17.253.5.208 8 GB Oct 29 04:13:53 8.43 %

http (tcp) AppleTV 17.253.5.201 7 GB Oct 29 04:22:12 8.27 %

http (tcp) AppleTV 17.253.5.203 7 GB Oct 29 04:17:28 7.86 %

http (tcp) AppleTV 17.253.1.202 7 GB Oct 29 04:18:11 7.37 %

http (tcp) AppleTV 17.253.5.205 6 GB Oct 29 04:19:32 6.57 %

http (tcp) AppleTV 17.253.1.201 4 GB Oct 29 04:21:26 4.85 %

https (tcp) Other Device 1 xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx 3 GB Oct 29 08:36:02 3.36 %

https (tcp) Other Device 2 xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx 2 GB Oct 29 08:37:08 2.78 %

http (tcp) AppleTV xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx 1 GB Oct 28 21:24:50 

The issue still exists and is almost certainly impacting others, though they may not have discovered it yet.

Just to follow up, since I turned off the aerial screensavers a couple of weeks ago, the problem is completely gone. I miss them, but family photos aren't so terrible. Hopefully if they fix it we will find out in some fashion.

ATV settings allows you to manage the (flyover) screensaver settings. You can select daily, weekly, monthly or no updates. There is a warning that some screensaver are nearly 1 gigabyte.