APPLE TV APP: Bought movies and downloaded them to external drive, cannot be opened or played on another apple device

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APPLE TV APP: Bought movies and downloaded them to external drive, cannot be opened or played on another apple device

Is it possible to buy and download movies from apple tv app, move files to external drive, and play the files offline and from other devices? Eg. iPads, computers, tvs, etc.

Thanks in advance, any help on this topic would be greatly appreciated.

Posted on Jun 15, 2022 9:27 PM

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Answer 1

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Urquhart1244

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Jun 15, 2022 10:05 PM in response to AIH26

You can play DRM’d files offline on the device with which it was downloaded.
To have these files available offline on other authorized/associated disk devices, they have to be downloaded on each of those directly from the source (Apple servers).
You can normally(*) home share to other devices, but that will require online communication with Apple’s authentication servers, even if streamed locally.
You can also use AirPlay to stream these downloaded files (that are authorized for on-device playback) to Apple TV box and other AirPlay-receiving devices. Not sure about offline for this.
You can’t access these files ‘freely’ outside Apple’s protected content setup, e.g. read from external disk directly using other apps. That is not allowed.

(*) Recently, some users report experiencing issues with home sharing of purchased content to the Apple TV box. It seems to be working for me though, when I tried just now.

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