Just a head's up. While attempting to watch a recently downloaded movie from the iTunes Store last night, it began stuttering (brief pauses/play cycles) every few minutes, or less, making it basically unwatchable.
This behavior doesn't affect all iTunes movie purchases, and only started last night, after a week successfully playing other iTunes movie purchases. I spent a couple of hours on the phone diagnosing the issue with AppleCare, including a factory restore on a one week old device, which didn't help.
Initially, I thought I was having a local bandwidth issue, but when I played these same movies from my old Apple TV (3rd gen), they continued to play just fine. They also played fine directly on my iMac in iTunes, and when I streamed them directly from Apple's servers to the new Apple TV. Why there's a buffering issue playing a local copy, but not with a cloud copy, is a puzzle.
Apple is shipping me a replacement to see if that resolves the issue.
This behavior doesn't affect all iTunes movie purchases, and only started last night, after a week successfully playing other iTunes movie purchases. I spent a couple of hours on the phone diagnosing the issue with AppleCare, including a factory restore on a one week old device, which didn't help.
Initially, I thought I was having a local bandwidth issue, but when I played these same movies from my old Apple TV (3rd gen), they continued to play just fine. They also played fine directly on my iMac in iTunes, and when I streamed them directly from Apple's servers to the new Apple TV. Why there's a buffering issue playing a local copy, but not with a cloud copy, is a puzzle.
Apple is shipping me a replacement to see if that resolves the issue.