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AppleTV Storage

The Apple TV is sold with a lot of storage, but much of that storage is not usable by your apps. Apple will use it for caching videos, pending updates, arial screensavers, and photos. There is no obvious way to free that storage for other apps.

On my lightly used 32GB Apple TV, I only had 1GB of free storage space remaining. It was not clear what was using my storage, since there were few apps installed.

I was able to increase the free space to 5GB by uninstalling apps and installing updates. However, a reset of the Apple TV was by far the quickest way to free storage. After the reset, I had 21GB free.

Here are some minor steps to increase your available storage:

  1. Install the TV Info app to quickly see how much storage you have available.
  2. Go to Settings > System > Software Updates > Update Software and ensure an update is not waiting to be installed and using storage.
  3. Go to Settings > General > Manage Storage and remove any apps you do not want. Typically, apps are not using a lot of the space on the device.
  4. You can try the Space Reclaimer app. It attempts to clear Apple’s caches, but users report very mixed results. I do not know if this will work for you. A reset of the AppleTV worked for me and was just as easy.

Reset the AppleTV

If the above does not help, you can free almost all storage by resetting the Apple TV. I had the “One Home Screen” feature enabled inside the user account, so Apple reinstalled all of my apps. This made the process was fairly easy for me. Your experience may be different.

I turned off the Aerial screensaver and Apple Photos after the reset. This appears to prevent most of the storage being immediately used by Apple.

These are the steps I followed to reset the AppleTV:

  1. Go to Settings > System > Reset -> Reset and Update and start the reset. My reset took about 20 minutes.
  2. After the reset, set up the AppleTV with your language, WIFI network, Apple Account, etc.
  3. When it asks you to “See the World” with Aerial screensavers, select “Not Now”.
  4. After the setup, go to Settings > Screensaver > Aerials > Download Frequency and set it to Never. Your device will still show the default LA Ariel screensaver.
  5. Go to Settings > Users and Accounts > Current User > Photos > iCloud Photos and Shared Albums and set these to Off. Then start the Photos app to confirm they are off. You can enable these if you’re willing to allocate the space to them.
  6. Enable the Settings > User and Accounts > Current User > One Home Screen setting to reinstall all apps.