I have had my Apple TV for 3 days now and the movie I wanted to rent still hasn't loaded. What am I doing wrong?

Question

I have had my Apple TV for 3 days now and the movie I wanted to rent still hasn't loaded. What am I doing wrong? The movie is only 1hr 33min but says it'll take over 4hrs to load.

Answer 1

AppleTV rentals are fixed size, and don't degrade quality if the connection is slow.
Minimum suggested requirements for 'instant' streaming are:
SD          2.5Mbps
720p HD  6 Mbps
1080pHD  8 Mbps
Any slower for the content quality selected (Settings iTunes store) and AppleTV has to partially download the movie in order to play through without rebuffering, and that can take anything from minutes to hours depending on internet speed and actual 'file size'.
The problem you see is usually related to slow intermet (very slow LAN connection from your router is rarely an issue but could be if AppleTV is not getting good signal).
On a computer use speedtest.net to test your internet speed.
When I has a 1 Mbs it would take 8-10 hours to download an SD title.
With 4.5 Mbps it take 15-30 minutes to play 720p movies, longer for 1080p.
A big flaw with AppleTV for those with slow connections is the limited hardware and memory - if you get bored waiting for the movie to start and use AppleTV say for YouTube. streaming from your computer iTunes or merely browsing the store trailers this can be enough to delete the portion of a rental already downloaded forcing it to restart each time you use it for something else.
If you turn out to have slow internet an alternative is to rent in iTunes on your computer, then once fully downloaded you can play on AppleTV under Computer>your iTunes>Rentals (only appears when a rental is on the  computer ready to play).  Alternatively lower rental quality settings from 1080p>720p>SD in future if you need faster starts.
I have also seen issues recently on some of my units where it starts downloading well, but for some reason freezes and refuses to fetch the rest unless I play from the start - this is usually after I've played and paused a rental a few minutes in and I've confirmed it just stops fetching more data sporadically - it never used to do this.
AC