Apple TV HD Rental Streaming Problem

I am having same issue with slow steaming and long, long load times on rented iTunes movies/shows. When watching the iTunes rented show, the stream will stop several times will more data loads. Netflix and You Tube stream almost instantly on Apple TV.

I have 7mps cable, Airport Extreme Base with Airport Express and stong WiFi Signal at the Apple TV point.

I have not found an Apple repose to this issue on any forum posts whether in or outside of Apple support. I guess they dont care about getting the rental revenue!!

Even though you have no problems with Neflix and Youtube, I would start by connecting the ATV via ethernet cable and see if the rental issue goes away. That will at least eliminate your wifi as the issue. If not then remove your router from the network. As a last resort you would plug the ATV directly into your modem. After all that if the problem still persists its either an Apple Store streaming issue or your connection.

ISP connection speed has little effect on this problem. I have a 13.9 mbit connection. Started to stream a HD film on the ATV2, watched it for an hour then it froze and up came the Loading... Sign. Took several attempts and about an hour of trying get the rest of the film to download. Ruined the evening. This streaming service is not yet fit for purpose.

I can see that quite a few people are having this time to load issue...go my new ATV about 2 weeks ago, rented Robin Hood in HD, at one point said it would take 23,000 minutes to load but then settled at 259 minutes. So I replaced my adsl modem router with a new one...no improvement...so I updated ATV to NOT load HD content figuring my bandwidth was just not enough...now 50 minutes to load a movive....watched a film last night after the 1 hour loading and towards the end it kept stopping and I would hit play again - it would authorise and then play another 5 minutes.....now the weird thing is that I have an old Apple TV and so I rented a movie on that ..non HD but was ready to play in 5 minutes....there's something seriously wrong with new ATV especially when not on huge bandwidth....Apple I hope you are ready this stream. I wonder where the new ATV hold the movie? Is there any storage in it at all? I was excited by the new ATV as no synching which to be honest over the years has been a total pain...but my kids just use the old ATV as they won't wait 60 minutes for a movie - like all kids today they want things fast....

Come on Apple sort this out - you are a clever lot.

Same here. Waiting for an update. Very disappointment.

David Greening wrote:
. . . now the weird thing is that I have an old Apple TV and so I rented a movie on that ..non HD but was ready to play in 5 minutes....there's something seriously wrong with new ATV especially when not on huge bandwidth....
Come on Apple sort this out - you are a clever lot.

I have seen similar comments from people who own both old and new ATV's on this forum. Since I only own a new apple tv, I can't test this myself, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is indeed some bug on the new apple tv. IF there is, I expect it will be fixed within a month or two. That is usually what happens with these new product releases.

I will say that increasing my ISP bandwidth did solve my high-speed streaming problems: now that I have 10+ Mbps (tested), the HD video podcasts, tv show rentals (tested on a free one), and HD movie trailers start playing in under 10 seconds and look great. Also my Netflix is giving me real HD streams now, whereas it wasn't before when I had 1.5-2.5 Mbps (tested) DSL. (Not to say there isn't also another problem related to the new Apple TV.)

I haven't watched a rented iTunes movie all the way through yet, so I can't say if the streaming hiccup after an hour is a problem for me. I did watch a free HD TV show that was 44 minutes long and that had no hiccups. Another forum user said that he thinks his ISP actually throttles down your connection speed after you have been using a lot of bandwidth for an hour straight, which would be quite alarming. I believe that other user was in Britian as well. I am in the U.S., and haven't experienced this problem yet.

this is ridiculous....

My network works fine with my iphone, laptop, and youtube on the apple tv.

I've just rented "Superman" dooms day' and it says "ready to play 116 minute"

Not only this problem, but also I constantly lose connection, when I turn on homeshare. And now and again my screen colours invert for up to 30 seconds before popping back. I've spent all week trying to resolve the home share problem. Apple engineers are aware of the inverting screen issue. But now this impossbily slow rental problem.. AAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!

I'm gonna change routers and quaddruple check my connection isnt being rubbish.

I though this would be a simple plug and play device but its now over a week of stress.

Phoned Apple Support yesterday who are amazing by the way. They have said they will send out a replacement model to resolve the inverting screen issue, and hopefully my connection problem. But we shall see...

Maybe it will just be some thing wrong with my simple home network, a BT home hub 2 router or some rubbish like that. But either way you should not have to have lots of network knowledge to get the ATV2 to work. Especially when everything else in our home works on wifi no questions asked. Ahh!

<Edited by Host>

I am also having the same issue as everybody here when renting HD movies. I know that my Internet connection is not the best (1.5 Mbps) so I knew that I would have to buffer the movie first.

As far as I know ATV2 comes with 8GB of storage, so that should be enough to fit 1 or 2 HD movies.

So when I rented my movie it showed the "Movie will be ready in 400 minutes" message. I was not surprised, I left it there hoping to watch it the next day. The next morning I checked if it had finished downloading and I saw a message saying "Movie is ready. To watch now press Play. To watch later press Menu". - Sweet! - I pressed Menu and thought - I'll watch it tonight when I get home. - I even checked the Internet usage that my ISP website provides and indeed it reported that ~5GB were downloaded during the night.

Well, when I got back home I selected the movie and pressed Play. As many here have reported I got again the "Movie will be ready in 400 minutes". What? OK, I thought maybe there's a bug in the software, I'll download the movie again and instead of pressing Menu, I'll press Play and watch the movie. So I left ATV2 downloading the movie again. The next morning I didn't even touch the ATV2 and just checked the ISP website to confirm that ~5GB were downloaded. So again, when I got back home that night I saw the "Movie is ready. To watch now press Play. To watch later press Menu" message. I just pressed Play, it went into a "loading" message for a couple of minutes and then it changed to "No content was found" or something like that. I selected the movie again only to be greeted with the "Movie will be ready in 400 minutes" message.

So something is not working correctly in the buffering of the new ATV.

I wonder if I can cancel that rental from my ATV2 and rent it on my Mac and then stream it from there. Hopefully this is a bug that will be fixed in a soon to come software update.

Same problem here - very frustrating.

We too have the same problem......

We have just purchased an Apple TV and this evening we rented a movie from the Apple TV (iTunes Store ?). When we cam to then watch the movie the screen says we have 29 days left, we went to PLAY the movie we get a message saying it is "Ready to play in 329 minutes" that’s is over 5 hours before we can watch it. This is totally unacceptable, all the hype around the Apple TV was that we could watch movies on demand, not have to wait over 5 hours before we can watch them. I have now cancelled the download and removed the movie from our rental list, as we have not been able to watch it. I have requesting a full refund of the rental fee with immediate effect. I am not sure if the iTunes Store will do this, if not they will have a battle on their hands as whilst it was only £3.49 I have very strong links with the Media (including Watchdog) so watch this space...I will be making sure they get the "publicity they rightly deserve"...Shame on you Apple....you have a lot to answer to and there is nowhere you can hide....this is going to do your reputation so much good ??????

Oh, and our broadband speed is 5meg so should be perfectly adequate for streaming.....

Can I suggest everyone (certainly those in the UK) drop a note to BBC Watchdog at http://www.bbc.co.uk/watchdog/gotastory/ I have already done this and the more people that do, the more chance this issue will be aired and Apple taken to task.

Val Howarth wrote:

. . .

Oh, and our broadband speed is 5meg so should be perfectly adequate for streaming.....

Did you actually test the speed around the time you experienced the problem, using something like speedtest.net? Or is 5Mbps just your provider's advertised speed, i.e.: "up to 5Mbps!" ?

Because I've found that advertised speeds and actual speeds are often very different things. My previous DSL service (AT&T) was "up to 3Mbps" but most tests showed I was actually getting 1.5-2 Mbps most of the time. My current cable service (Time Warner) is "up to 10 Mbps", but my tests so far have shown 18, 20, and once even 28 Mbps.

I would say 7MBs is adequate.

I just tried to rent a movie for the first time on my new Apple TV and I was very surprised at how frustrating this is. I can't believe Apple didn't test this whole streaming thing. I rented a small TV show and it worked fine but the movie experience really *****. I clicked to rent the movie and it said there was a 50 minute wait. Then after a while it said it was ready to watch, so I thought OK cool. I clicked to play and get another message that it will be ready in 28 minutes. Huh? It stayed on this 28 minutes without changing till I finally gave up. Maybe it will download someday. Someone did a lousy job testing this. I have 5.5 Mbps bandwidth and have no problems streaming other stuff. I really feel let down by this. Apple please make the new ATV work!

Same issue here, extremely disappointing. Not the user experience I have come to expect from Apple.