Is ATV seriously hungry for bandwidth?

Question

I installed my first ATV on my home network a few days ago. It set up easily and I had all features working beautifully. Last night I checked out my internet volumes (I'm on a quota system at home) and found I've way used more bandwidth over the past three days than I had over the past three months (and beyond). I'm blown away by this because I've been downloading movies, videos, podcasts, etc, for a long time before ATV without putting a dent in my internet quota. What the hey does ATV do that could consume this much?
Am I going to have to sell my first born just to purchase more volume capacity for this hungry little mother?

Answer 1

Bitrate is always important. the mpeg4/10 standard has various profiles that use different levels of predictive sampling, higher level profiles use different bit depth sampling and chroma sampling producing higher quality video. (The tv is limited to the main (low complexity) profile)
However each profile has its own standards that encoded video must conform to and regardless of the algorithms used to do this encoding the end result must produce a video file that meets such standards. Different engines will produce different qualities to an extent but not significantly enough to warrant reducing bitrates by substantial amounts.
A number of comparisons of tv HD content to content from other sources including HD broadcasts and other download services have shown tv to have the higher quality video and so whilst this would indicate the bandwidth required for tv is only slightly more than other devices, I'm still a little surprised at the size of the file you downloaded. I wonder what other movies are, as I assume not all providers will use the same settings. And I also wonder if file sizes have been reduced for newer films over a period of time due to bandwidth demand, as I seem to recall that downloads made after the initial launch of the service were somewhat larger.