How do I avoid losing a rented movie?

I really like my Apple TV 2, so planned to use it to rent a movie. Usually I use a Mac or iPad to do this, but on the Mac, the movie is only rentable in SD and I tried downloading on the iPad and playback failed after 12 minutes, never to work again. The ATV was my last resort.
Twice I have apparently successfully downloaded, and got the message saying it's ready to watch, press Play or Enter. Since I had other stuff to do, I pressed Enter. Each time after this, the movie is no longer ready to play, and the ATV says I'll have to wait a few hours. Sometimes I get the "error in this content" message.
It's been several days now that I've been trying to watch my first rented movie, and it still hasn't happened. It's downloading for the fourth time as I write this.
After downloading on the Apple TV, must I avoid doing anything else with the ATV before watching the movie? What will cause an ATV to lose a downloaded movie?
Hope you can help. Everything else on this box is fine, AirPlay, Netflix, movies/music/photos from my Mac, Podcasts, but this movie renting has been a real pain.

John Kitchen wrote:
After downloading on the Apple TV, must I avoid doing anything else with the ATV before watching the movie? What will cause an ATV to lose a downloaded movie?
AppleTV 2 is very frustrating in this regard either if you have a slow connection or a data cap for each month.
I suspect you have a slowish connection speed (6-8 Mbps required for near instant HD streaming). I'm on around 4 Mbps and it will take about 40 mins to buffer an HD film.
As you say, other actions unfortunately unpredictably wipe the download from memory.
There is no definite consistency here, but things which have caused this for me include simply browsing the trailer for another movie or playing content from my local iTunes library. Can't get Netflix in UK but suspect thsi will also flush the download.
The issue relates to AppleTV not having much internal storage compared to AppleTV1 which had a hard drive.
The AppleTV2 has 8GB of solid state memory which is shard between all kinds of tasks, however I don't think this is managed particularly well for downloads which could easily be protected from deletion if they wanted to by simply asking the user when they try to do something that would need this - equally there should be enough memory to hold at least 1 HD movie and perform other actions including playing local content if they wanted to manage the memory in this way.
For slower internet connections this makes renting a chore if you inadvertently do something else with the device as it's no longer ready when you want to watch.
Both for slow connections, and those with data caps, the repeat downloading can really add up - one user notd using over 20GB of download bandwidth just to watch one film.
Send some feedback here:
http://www.apple.com/feedback/appletv.html

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