Quick Start on AppleTV 4
I updated my UK AppleTV 4 the other day and was shocked by the poor quality of some purchased iTunes content I was trying to playback from the cloud using the Movies app (fortunately we don't have the replacement app yet in the UK).
This was particularly worrying as it was playing via recently installed ethernet cabling and I'm getting at least 50-60 Mbps download speeds.
No idea when the Quick Start feature appeared but it was the culprit.
Apple had traditionally offered fixed size media files/streams for rentals/purchases from iTunes when downloaded to the original AppleTV 1 or played on the subsequent ATV 2-4.
One of the commonest complaints here over the years is why iTunes Movies say they will take hours to play when Netflix etc play immediately.
The answer of course was that Apple was serving the full quality of the download you could make in iTunes or on an iOS device, whereas Netflix and many others used rate adaptive streaming lowering video quality for slow connections. Good when you wanted quality, not so good if you had a slow connection or had a bad one when travelling (I still remember it taking 12-24 hours to download an SD rental on ATV 1 when I had a 1 Mbps connection).
Quick Start seems to be a response to these complaints and undoubtedly will be useful for many with slow connections, but from limited experience the degradation in image quality was not worth it for me, but I did not persevere to see if it improves (often noticed with Netflix with a 5 Mbps connection that first few secs were pixellated and it rapidly imrpoved).
Search has not been reliable of late and I failed to find any obvious discussions about this ATV 4 feature which I assume was only recently introduced.
I'd be interested to hear other people's experiences with Quick Start, good or bad. I've always been impressed with Netflix's rate adaptive streams which have always been very good with limited bandwidth. Other providers including NowTV and Amazon Prime video often seemed much worse by comparison to me, though I don't use them that often.
One annoyance for me is that Quick Start was enabled by default whereas I think it should be Off by default with a comment that you can enable it (or reduce resolution) if buffering a fixed size feed will take many minutes/hours.
By extension I wonder if QuickStart is seen as a necessity should Apple move to supporting 4k video (which really should have been available as a spec even if no media was available) on release of ATV 4 which was behind the curve in my view as 4k becomes common place on TVs.
If iTunes launched 4k video and many people were struggling to stream 4k without buffering much larger fixed size files, Quick Start could fool them into thinking they were getting 4k easily on ATV4 when in fact quality would be markedly degraded vs fixed stream (and that likely to be poor compared to 4k BluRay anyway due to significantly reduced bitrates). In addition 4k streaming assuming a much higher bandwidth requirement could also stress Apple's distribution servers if uptake was high - Quick Start on by default could reduce such pressures, but I'm cynical....
It seems it may also affect ability to play 5.1 DD for some users too, presumably the rate adaptive feed can switch to stereo only in some if not all cases:
MacBook Pro, 2015 - El Cap - usable ports
