This thread is a year old, but I just wanted to say that I really appreciate how much BasketB has tried to document his issue. So far, he's yet to find a solution, but I shall keep wading through this serialized drama to see if he finally does. I really feel and empathize with your frustration, BB.
As a retired computer tech, I agree with him that this entire system of broadcasting seems unnecessarily riddled with problems. Not a huge fan of Bluetooth either, but why not use anything other than creating another wifi network that likely interferes with existing ones. HP does this with all of their printers and it took me ages to turn those off when I finally found them. We have more devices than ever on our wifi networks and that's not going to change anytime soon. Adding ones that don't need to be there seems really unintuitive and just dumb.
I'm on page 2 now of all the comments, so maybe I'll get to a solution here, but I'm having similar issues with my Ultra and wish there was another easy way to connect the remote without interfering with my wifi. We used to troubleshoot this stuff full time and get paid for it. I don't want to have to hassle with that anymore.
Stuff should just work.
Anyway, mostly I just wanted to say to BasketB, I feel your pain and frustration.
I dumped my AppleTV for a Roku and find the latter to be a superior streaming device. I would love to be able to customize (or disable!) some of the buttons on the Roku remote, but the AppleTV remote gets my vote as the most awful piece of hardware that Apple has EVER designed. So the flawed Roku remote is still better. Just wish they'd made more effort to have the pause play and rewind buttons easier to feel in the dark, and just get rid of the channel buttons below them. The home button gets you right back to the screen where it's easy enough to go straight to Netflix or Hulu, and the ESPN and Sling buttons are totally useless to me.
Ever Onward...
