Q: Apple TV HD Rental Streaming Problem

I am in Canada as well and can tell you Rogers is really bad with throttling

In Toronto here. ROGERS *****!!! Thinking of leaving them soon and checking out TekSavvy.
http://teksavvy.com/en/default.asp

Really Apple? Su*cks is a bad word? JEESH!

I have to agree in thinking it to be an Apple TV2 problem...

While I had a movie rented, I tried playing from various distances of my Airport, tried plugging it in to the wall ethernet socket, the back of the Airport, and directly into the router.. all situations came back with at least a 2 hour wait time from pressing play.

During the testing, various speedtest sites gave me between 10-30mb/s... (Side note Speedtest.net seemed quite random, giving me a reading of 52mb/s at one point, and down to 13mb/s.. I pay for 25)

Apple were kind enough to reset my last movie that expired as unwatchable... I will see if this new update helps the buffering...

Does anyone know if Apple is going to deal with this in the near future ? Very frustrating here in the east coast US.

Agreed. Unfortunately they don't offer decent service in my area. I'm with cogeco for now, all is well at the moment.

Apple put out an update today that is supposed to fix the problem where you download a rental overnight and then come back the next day and it's gone requiring you to download it again.

Yes throttling in my experience is the root of the issue with streaming for me. Bell is my ISP and from 7-12pm everyday, my 12Mbps speed drops from 1-4Mbps. This makes the Apple TV completely unusable. Long load times are guaranteed. However, in the past few weeks throttling has stopped and I have had no issues. Either Bell has heard my complaints (doubtful), or their new Fibe TV prevents them from throttling to avoid bad experiences for end users. Unlike Rogers, Bell throttles the whole Internet. Rogers throttles P2P, and to their credit they are transparent about it. Having said that, it would not surprise me one bit if theses ISPs who are also TV providers would throttle iTunes as a method of making customers come to them for movies. iTunes rentals are the most cost efficient for new releases when compared to what these ISPs offer, and I for one will not use their services over Apple TV in Canada.

I wish Apple would become an ISP!

Yeah I wish Apple was an ISP and Cellular Network Provider as well!

Since applying the latest update, I tested it with a rental last night. Since I had full speed from my ISP, I did not have any loading issues. Again, this is my personal experience only. I am happy to say that the Apple TV is cacheing the downloaded file, and I can now pause or exit to the main menu without incurring a re-download. When I returned this morning to play the movie from the beginning again, the entire film was ready to play and the whole file was still on the flash drive. This behaviour is like the Gen 1 Apple TV and is a great relief to see working the way it should. Theoretically, you could rent the film well in advance of watching it (away from ISP throttle times if it is affecting you), and it will be there to view in its entirety when you are ready. I imagine that the only time the file would require downloading again, would be if there is no space on the 8GB flash drive to store multiple HD films.
All in all my issue appears to be solved. I hope that those of you whose "streaming" issue is not the result of ISP throttling, can find a resolution soon. Apple TV IMHO has always been the most cost efficient and enjoyable ways for me to rent films in the years that I have had one. I am happy that Gen 2 has finally earned its place beside my Gen1.

My experience as well.

My Gen1 ATV always streamed rentals immediately.

The Gen2 frequently takes forever to load. When it first came out months ago it mostly worked but as of late seeing this problem more and more.

Frustrating - the other nite tried in vain to start a movie we had seen before with about 30 min left on the rental. After many failed load tries and restarts, it was finally ready to watch. Hit play and it said we were not authorized! (24 hr exp). This would never have happened with Gen1.

I hear that - I started thinking I can always use Rogers On Demand... Then I laughed at myself... the thought of giving even more money to Rogers make makes me want to vomit...

After the update, I'm still having inordinately long wait times downloading HD movie rentals on my new ATV. My old ATV would take about 5min before letting me watch the HD movie, now it takes 2 hours. SD movies still start in a minute or two but HD takes forever. My new ATV is connected by ethernet as was my old ATV.

I was in the middle of a 3 hour download of Inception in HD when I heard of this new update today. I stopped the download and reset my settings with the new update. Instead of 3 hours it only took 2 hours. What's the point of "on demand" HD when you have to wait 2 hours? I didn't mind waiting 5-10 min like my old ATV, but two hours?!

No problems with streaming Netflix.

same problem here. Ridiculously long buffers. We attempted to watch Night & Day Sunday night (in SD). 2 hour movie took 5 hours to get through, with numerous breaks in the action to buffer. messages said anywehre from 46 minutes to 5 hours to finsih buffering.
No problems renting/watching movies on the old Apple Tv or accessing the internet on any other device in the house.

I did notice some kind of a speed test option under the general options tab on the apple tv. I ran the test. Nothing showed up on my end, but it does send data backto apple. I'm assuming they will use this to tweak the service to work correctly. If you haven't done it, it might be worth running the test one time.

So there is new update 4.1.1

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4448

According to that link: "+Addresses an issue that may cause a movie or TV show to be re-downloaded.+"

I hope that is the fix I was waiting for.