Apple TV+ Buffering

brown_family3,

Thanks for coming back. It sounds like you have a fast internet connection, but your actual internal Wi-Fi network could be the bottleneck, especially if you have lots of devices on your network. One way of testing this is to run an Ethernet cable directly to the Apple TV to see if that helps the issue. You can see more about this process here:

If your Apple TV can't connect to Wi-Fi

Best Regards.

Hello brown_family3,

Thanks for reaching out to us in Apple Support Communities about buffering while using Apple TV+. We're happy to help by looking into this more! 

The following support article provides some troubleshooting steps to try for this behavior:

If you can't watch or stream movies and TV shows in the Apple TV app

As mentioned in the article, if you connect via Wi-Fi, you will need to make sure your Wi-Fi network is capable enough for the HD content in Apple TV+. Streaming HD content requires 8 Mbit/s or faster. Slower tiers of Wi-Fi connections might not be fast enough to stream HD video content.

Hope this helps.

Best Regards.

Hardwired Ethernet and still consistently cache video or lowering the streaming bit rate encoding

brown_family3,

Thanks for the reply. Not all services stream at the same quality. Some services will require more data depending on the quality at which they stream data. The Ethernet cable suggestion was meant to be more of a test and not a permanent solution, if that helps with the overall distance the cable needs to run. Testing with an Ethernet cable can help us to isolate the issue and also allow your Apple TV to update to the latest version of TVOS to see if that helps. Let us know what the results of that test are and if using an Ethernet cable helps at all.

Update your Apple TV - Apple Support

Hope this helps.

Best Regards.

Trying a full reset and update download however now it’s stating “12 hours” to download an update. Another observation is that app updates are taking quite a long time for their devices or failing on occasion which indicates that the content distribution is having issues (cdn centers)

This can’t be a transport issue, this only occurs with the Apple TV device and the tv+ service, that combination specifically. I have a consistent 800+ Mbps connection and two Apple TV devices, one running the betas and the other production code.

How do go about onboarding our internet service providers to the apple akamai cdn endpoints? Such as what Verizon and comcast have done and should be part of the net neutrality initiative? https://www.macworld.com/article/223950/what-apples-new-content-delivery-network-means-for-net-neutrality-and-for-you.html

From the article above - will Apple invest into the delivery of their tv+ to more service provider as did Netflix?

”Earlier this year, Netflix decided to start paying Comcast an undisclosed but substantial fee to directly connect its network, and, lo, did the download speed suddenly increase. Netflix has since signed other similar agreements. By opting in, Netflix is adding expense which will have to be passed on to customers and which lands squarely in the pockets of ISP executives and shareholders. Apple, to offer competitive quality with Netflix, needs the same deal, even though Apple is thus far more akin to a video-download service rather than a streaming one. So far, these contracts and fees remain outside any requirements of reporting to the public under any FCC rules, and thus there’s no independent way for consumers or regulators to assess their fairness or necessity.”

Tracert (trace route command line that shows the network hops to an endpoint) is timing out via google fiber (webpass) internet access services. This is the root cause

If you can provide the dns names of the content distribution sites (the cdn network endpoints) I can do a trace route and see where the lag or dropped packets are happening.

It appears that apple or Akamai have fixed the content distribution routing issue late last night and things look performant now.