If AirPlay isn’t working for you on your old Apple TV, iOS 16 is to blame.
One of the Apple TV’s most useful features are AirPlay support, which lets you easily and quickly stream and mirror y our iPhone, iPad or Mac screen to your TV. However, it looks like iOS 16 has somewhat discontinued AirPlay support for some older Apple TVs.
Apparently this error only affects second and third generation Apple TV modelswhich were released in 2010 and 2012. Also, it seems to mainly affect DRM-restricted content, i.e. content from streaming services like Netflix, Disney+ or Apple TV+ that we stream on Apple TV.
iOS 16 has a bug with Airplay on some Apple TVs
If you try to AirPlay a movie or TV show from one of these services to an Apple TV 2 or Apple TV 3, you’ll see an error message: “An error occurred while loading this content. Please try again later”. However, I cast the same content from a device running iOS 15.7, AirPlay works perfectly with Apple TV 2 and Apple TV 3.
In addition, if we mirror the screen of our iPhone or iPad on these Apple TVs, the problem does not appear. That is, it seems that the error only reoccurs when we send copyrighted content.
Apple’s latest software update for the Apple TV 3 was released on March 14 this year, so clearly the problem seems to be in iOS 16. Which is good news, because it has an easier solution. It is a problem that in a future performance of the Apple system, it will solve this problem with AirPlay.
It is true that these are two very old devices, in fact there are many popular apps are no longer supported. But precisely for this reason, sending content via AirPlay was one of the few options available to users. Moreover, the Apple TV 3 was sold until the end of 2016so there are still many users who have it running.
lose one function as powerful as AirPlay This is a real hassle for all users who own one of these Apple TV models. This is probably one of the coolest features of these devices and we hope Apple fixes it with a software update.