apple tv does not access iTunes - 4/17/2014

Same problem here, we were planning to rent a movie on a relaxing Saturday evening...guess not! :-(

Wasted time resetting and reloading the entire 1st Gen ATV.

Apple, please throw us a bone!!

I should have come here first. I thought it was my wi-fi with a bad connection. Wasted too many hours trying to reconnect the ATV1 to my iTunes to stream my shows. The ATV1 is useless right now.

I think Apple is being hacked and they will not admit it.

Apple user since 1984

whitby12 wrote:

If you haven't already, make sure your subtitles are set to "english" from the ATV settings menu.

Hope it helps.

I thought I had done that but I will double-check. Thanks for the tip.

Ottawa Canada, 1st Gen. Same issues as of five minutes ago (2100 EST) on Monday, April 21st. I too did an entire factory restore and reload 120 GB of data over the last 24 hours!

Dear Apple,

I have bought an iphone iphone 3,4s and 5s. I have a Mac book pro and iPad 2 and an Apple TV. If you do not have the respect for your customers for a 2 line press release as to whether this is a software bug and you are on it or that you have decided to move on from ATV1 and we will all need to upgrade (which is annoying but forgivable) I will dump all of my apple products and move on. I promise I am not alone

Thank you

Loyal apple customer

As an Apple user for over 25 years, this out-of-the-blue bricking of a still working product is VERY disappointing. My wife and I have a first-gen ATV that works great and we use several times a week. Suddenly--it's useless. A "loyalty" brand like Apple should have the courtesy to give advance notice or at least a simple press release on the problem.

Because of this serious customer support breach, we are seriously considering other options to replace our ATV. I have been an EXTREMELY loyal Apple fan, but I'm sorry guys, you just lost my confidence. In the past, I have recommended ATV to over six of my friends who purchased it, but at this point am not planning to do so again in the future. You didn't just lose one future sale, you lost six.

Sincerely,

A HIGHLY disappointed Apple customer

They do not seem to be very concerned.

I told iTunes support I was moving on to Amazon TV, although they offer every kind of soothing words possible, they still do not make a direct acknowledgment of any issue.

Instead, they send you on a vague wilde goose chase, taking every precaution to not raise your expectations.

Read their answer;

Hi Pascal,

Thanks for writing back and I hope you are having an awesome day so far.

Pascal, please know that Apple is constantly working to expand Apple's services. Your comments and suggestions are an integral part of this continuing effort to provide quality content. You can submit the feedback at this link:

http://www.apple.com/feedback

While you will not receive a response from this department, please be assured that the advisors who review all of our patron's concerns do take these matters seriously.

Please don't feel brushed off because I sent you a link to feedback. Apple acknowledges that no one is better able to provide well-informed opinions and suggestions than the people who use the service, and this is the fastest way for your voice to be heard. Based on what I've been told, this feedback gets read by everyone all the way up the chain, and your efforts to help Apple improve are greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,

Allen Rae

iTunes Store/Mac App Store Customer Support

fully agree, same here: 2x mac book, 3x ipads, 5x iphones and 1x ATV - dont let us down, where is your proactive customer communication? at least on fb.....

Just a reminder(or first time notice) that you can make the ATV temporarily functional again by turning on parental controls under settings and deny purchase and rent abilities. You should see an instant speed boost from the UI and content you have on the ATV will populate the top area that normally shows things you can buy/rent

Me too! Sooo annoying! You can back out and resume and it'll be gone but it happens again the very next time there's a translation. Drives me nuts.

Last movie I bought it seemed to be OK, though.

However it has this funny little black box near the bottom, a little tiny black box that's there all through the movie. Weird.

Anybody have an answer for this? Same deal here. No way to acces iTunes. ATV1. Very disapointing. Have been an Apple customer since 1990 because the products always worked. Not so much right now...

Setting youe subtitle language to English will get rid of the subtitles, but as you've seen sometimes a black subtitle box will appear. If you stop the movie by pressing menu, and then resume the box will go away. On most movies you only need to do this once at the beginning. [Though on some films - usually with foreign language on the audio track - the box will re-appear]

I am fairly pleased that this evening my Atv now works. I turned it on after a full day without touching it. It had an update to bring it back to 3.0.2. I then took the advice from another post to enable parental controls, and it located all my movies from my HDD as well as content from itunes. I am not sure if the parental controls was the actual solution. I will see how well everything else works once my kids go to bed.

jonnyrosen on a macrumors.com post said today: "i spoke to apple joint venture today. membership does have its benefits. the technician had no idea there was a problem and said he would get back to me.

within 10 minutes he called back and said he spoke to the apple tv folks. they are aware of the problem and working on a fix. they believed it was a problem with their server. it was not intentional. they are working on having it fixed." thanks jr and thanks AppleTV team for working on a fix. may the force be with you 🙂

nja... wrote:

As an Apple user for over 25 years, this out-of-the-blue bricking of a still working product is VERY disappointing. My wife and I have a first-gen ATV that works great and we use several times a week. Suddenly--it's useless. A "loyalty" brand like Apple should have the courtesy to give advance notice or at least a simple press release on the problem.

Because of this serious customer support breach, we are seriously considering other options to replace our ATV. I have been an EXTREMELY loyal Apple fan, but I'm sorry guys, you just lost my confidence. In the past, I have recommended ATV to over six of my friends who purchased it, but at this point am not planning to do so again in the future. You didn't just lose one future sale, you lost six.

Sincerely,

A HIGHLY disappointed Apple customer

Jeez, give Apple a break. There is no way that this was intentional. Do you really think they'd cut off the iTunes Store revenue stream generated from tens of thousands of ATV's on a holiday weekend?

It's a complex digital world, and despite best intentions sometimes something goes wrong. In my experience, relative to other providers, stuff goes wrong with Apple gear and services less frequently than others.

If the fix requires an ATV G1 software update, that's going to require verification and validation on their part to make sure the fix works and doesn't mess something else up. If that's happening, my guess is that there is a 24/7 effort to push it out ASAP.

Take a breath. This practically defines a "1st world problem." I'm not happy about it, either, but I'm not going to pound the table and condemn the whole company over a few days of downtime with a device that's been working well for about 7 years.