This is very poor from Apple. I would understand this if it were a technical issue but it is merely to protect revenue. Well Apple, you are selling a lot of these into educational environments where proxy servers are the norm. Appalling use of power !

Hi WC, thanks for the welcome and sorry if this comes across as a spout off.

We have just purchased 3 ATV's for Classrooms as an initial test. We are sat behind a County Council Proxy Server which unless we want to go Broadband independant (not a viable option currently) we are stuck with.

I received the ATV's today and tried to set one up but found it hung when trying to set Date and Time (assume it was trying to connect to a NTP). I also gather that my ATV's will never get updates, so my units are automatically disadvantaged. No bug fix's, No Apple general development enhancements either. Since my iPad was configurable for a proxy, I assumed that ATV would be to but I am shocked that it isn't. I kind of understand what you're talking about but in all honesty, couldn't apple have researched this and perhaps protected studio's some other way.

I am going to spend some time with these to see how usable they now are. It would be interesting to see how many configs / pull updates the ATV tries to do. We essentially only want to be able to display iPad content through our HDMI projectors.

Thanks

I have to be connected to our network through our WiFi connection. This seems to trigger the ATV to think it has a full connection and tries to connect to the ouside world to check for a time provider and updates.

So how do I stop ATV from trying to sync to a time provider and how do I get Apple updates ?

Thanks

I've just also realised that the ATV won't activate without an Internet connection. any idea's how i get around this?

Thanks

Ahh ... so another way to update and presumably activate also is to connect directly to a connected PC. Will it automatically use the PC's connection or do i have to configure it manually to use the micro USB?

Thanks

OK WC, thank you very much for your input. Activation is probably very quick when you have a direct connection but does not happen at all when you are connected through a proxy. I think I am going to have to take this ATV box home to allow activation and connect to an NTP ... Hopefully when I put it back onto our School network it will be ok.

Thanks again for your advice but I still think this will be an issue for lots of people who buy for education as this is a standard mechanism for Schools Internet provision.

Thanks again.