Apple TV just lost the ability to play content via home share.

Yup. Sign out and stay signed out of iTunes store. This worked for me. I don't really rent movies from the iTunes store so this is an ok solution for me.

This is exactly th problem we've been having since about midday (aest) today... I'm soo glad you posted this, we just got the apple tv earlier in the week and the kids love it, then suddenly it stops working for them. Pretty annoying but good to know its apples fault and not something we did wrong. Waiting for a fix I guess.

I'm having the same issue and have tried just about everything!

Signing out of the iTunes Store worked for me too. Good find. It's not perfect but at least I can use the Apple TV again. Just for the record I tried streaming movies from machines running 10.6 and 10.7, resetting all the hardware in the house, restoring the AppleTV to defaults and setting it up again, and none of that worked. I ended up syncing the movie we were going to watch to my iPad and streaming it to the Apple TV with AirPlay, but that was after nearly an hour of tinkering with it to no avail. Glad someone found at least a temporary fix.

I was having the same issue tonight. Across 3 Apple TV2s, 2 different macs. All latest patches/firmwares. 2 of them worked earlier today up until around 1130 PDT. Tonight, all 3 spinning forever.

Within the last 30 min or so, they started working again. So my bet is on the "problem with authentication system" being likely.

Edit: Forgot to mention. About 1-1/2 hours ago, I even did a restore on one thinking that might fix it. Nope. Ok now though.

Message was edited by: mmarionsd

I've just tested mine out now, and it appears to be resolved, both purchased and home movies and tv shows are working again.

I have a friend who has an Apple TV with his home sharing coming from a PC who has been experiencing this problem for a while. I kept telling him that it was likely the way his PC interfaced with iTunes... until I received my 27-inch, Late 2013 - 3.2 GHz Intel Core i5 - 8GB - NVIDIA GeForce GT 755M 1024 MB. Now I'm the proud owner of the spinning brick of an Apple TV.

I did all the troubleshooting I could think of (like many others in this thread), including de-authorizing all my computers, but cannot get any 'shared' items from my computer (which does show up just fine) to play. This includes previously downloaded "game of thrones" episodes - which DO play just fine when I go through the "Purchased" library directly from the Apple TV interface (streaming from Apple).

What I really don't understand is why I can't find any troubleshooting help from Apple directly... just forum threads that describe essentially the identical problems.

I am having the same issues daily SWoD...which is annoying as all ****. But what annoys me the most is that after 2 yrs of people posting about this, Apple has yet to provide a fix for this. If it helps any, signing out of iTunes and iCloud sometmes help.