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Apple TV taking a long time to load purchased content

I purchased shows on my Apple TV, but I get one of two messages 1) my show will be ready in x hours (enter absurdly long timeframe here) or 2) unable to connect to iTunes. I ran a speed test, and my ping is 30 ms, download 30Mbps and upload 7Mbps. I am on fiber optic internet, so I do not have a modem. However, I have power cycled the ATV and the wireless router. I have replaced the wireless router with a dual band router. I have connected the ATV directly to the router via ethernet. My ISP says it must be an Apple issue as they can see nothing wrong with my service, and I can still stream content for Netflix, Youtube, etc.


Any ideas?

Posted on Jul 8, 2014 9:05 PM

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Posted on Jul 9, 2014 1:48 AM

Provided you get sustained 30Mbps and your ISP isn't throttling speed at certain times, it should work fine.


You only need 8 Mbps for near instant 1080p playback from iTunes store. Slower and it will buffer/recalculate/buffer/recalculate…and you may see minutes or many hours predicted if downloading is slow.


Netflix and other will work with less as they adjust quality in relation to connection speed.


The ethernet excluded a wifi issue, and the only other local concern would be another user on your network downloading and reducing overall bandwidth.


It could be Apple's servers having a bad day or two.


The only other thought would be your DNS servers - use your ISPs default as some (such as OpenDNS I believe) can re-route traffic and makes accessing Apple's streaming servers very slow. There are a few posts here where DNS servers have been the culprit.


Apple TV (2nd and 3rd generation): Troubleshooting playback performance


Good luck.

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Question marked as Best reply

Jul 9, 2014 1:48 AM in response to jcnypen

Provided you get sustained 30Mbps and your ISP isn't throttling speed at certain times, it should work fine.


You only need 8 Mbps for near instant 1080p playback from iTunes store. Slower and it will buffer/recalculate/buffer/recalculate…and you may see minutes or many hours predicted if downloading is slow.


Netflix and other will work with less as they adjust quality in relation to connection speed.


The ethernet excluded a wifi issue, and the only other local concern would be another user on your network downloading and reducing overall bandwidth.


It could be Apple's servers having a bad day or two.


The only other thought would be your DNS servers - use your ISPs default as some (such as OpenDNS I believe) can re-route traffic and makes accessing Apple's streaming servers very slow. There are a few posts here where DNS servers have been the culprit.


Apple TV (2nd and 3rd generation): Troubleshooting playback performance


Good luck.

Jul 9, 2014 1:50 AM in response to jcnypen

If you have a Mac or PC, try downloading the content to there, enable Home Sharing and then stream from teh active computer to AppleTV via Computers icon.


Content has to fully download to iTunes, but this may be a workaround for now and it will also let you test if AppleTV specifically is slow downloading if the computer gets the expected speed.

Jul 9, 2014 4:09 PM in response to jcnypen

Mine has been doing this since I purchased it. It didn't matter about the connection speed because I have tried two locations and my computer would download a new video in half the time it would take to load it on my Apple TV. So I just home share everything. The only annoying part is when I am using my laptop and I hit play watching something and it plays music on it too. I never even paired it with it. It would be nice not to have to have iTunes open all the time. If you figure it out, let me know. I have tried several times with wicked fast connection and nothing made it load any quicker.

Apple TV taking a long time to load purchased content

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