I've had AppleTV for a number of years and have never had an issue until recently.

My Netflix, Amazon Prime video, and everything else will download without issue or delay. However, when I try to download from the "Movies" icon, it takes forever...sometimes hours.

This doesn't make sense to me. I've tried calling Apple support (and they were no help) and I've rebooted my AppleTV box and router. Nothing seems to work and I still have extremely slow downloads of Apple movies but nothing else.

Any suggestions? Do I just need to toss out my Gen 2 box and buy a new one (they are now Gen 4 I believe)?

Thanks in advance.

Have you tried to remove your Wi-Fi settings from the Apple TV yet?

There should be a setting allowing you to wipe or forget the Wi-Fi settings, then reboot both that and the router, then go back and add the Apple TV back to the Wi-Fi network.

^^^ Yeah, I did. Wiped everything clean and started over. No joy.

Have you cleared any cache files, I know on Android boxes that can slow things down once the amount of storage is getting full.

Worse case, factory reset and reload everything.

Wonder if it's one of Apples normal tactics of slowing you down so you'll buy a new product scheme like they did on the iPhone

Netflix and the others will stream at whatever quality your bandwidth will permit, and adjust on the fly. Due to all the compression they use, the difference in quality between 720p/1080/4K may not be noticeable, depending on your TV resolution, size, and viewing distance. 480p might even look ok.

Apple TV downloads an actual video file and holds it in flash memory. HD movies are in the ~5GB range, while 4K is a lot more. The ATV will let you watch once the download has completed enough so that at the current download speed you can watch the whole movie without stopping to download. That doesn't mean the whole file has to be downloaded, just that the rate of download is faster than the the time to watch it. Of course, if your connection slows down mid download you may have to stop and wait.

If you are on WiFi, you may have bandwidth issues caused by interference from other WiFi networks in the neighborhood. I use the Airport Setup App on my iPhone to sniff nearby networks and see what channel they are on. 2.4 GHz is very crowded and there are only 11 channels. Invariably they are defaulted to 1 or 11. 5 GHz is much less used so I try to use it as much as possible, but the range is more limited.

Trying connecting via ethernet (long cable if needed) and see if it improves. Also look and see if there is a speed test app for ATV and see what speeds you are getting.

I use a PowerLine hardwire connection (about like 100 BaseT Ethernet over your electrical wires)and I can watch 4K HDR movies instantly with minimal issues.

Lefty, thanks for that info. I didn't know that about ATV movies vs. the others.

What is troubling is that it all worked fine up until recently. There's no other wifi networks in the area (I'm out in the country with no other house within a couple hundred yards).

I did do a speed test on the General icon, but it didn't tell me the results.

I don't know. It's just aggravating.

Just for giggles, download install and run the speedtest app to the Apple TV.

In settings make sure the Apple TV is running the latest available firmware. Even if auto updates is on check it manually anyway.

Your V2 is a 10 year old version, came out in 2010 originally, and only has 256MB of memory and 8 GB of storage.

The current version is V5 and called Apple TV 4K (V4 was called Apple TV HD) But V5 came out in '17 so it is well past due for an update as well... MacRumors rates it a "Do Not Buy / Wait for update"... but only little Timmy knows when that will be.

The V2 is no longer supported by Apple. I have 2 of the 4k versions (latest spec I think) and 3 of the old 1080p versions. I tried to put hbo max on one of the 1080p versions and couldn't so researched and they are unsupported now. Apple is set to release a new Apple TV box some time this year so I'd just deal with it until the new one comes out. I need to replace 2 of the 1080p versions I have but not doing right before an all new box is coming out. cparktd is 100% correct and does what I do, look at macrumors buy, do not buy page, and click on whichever device.

Thanks guys. I'll just wait for the new version.