How to get iTunes to stop trying to download purchases

Question

I purchased a TV series season last year to watch on my Apple TV. My Macbook still tries to download all the episodes every time I launch iTunes.

I read online that you can delete everything in the itunes>media>downloads folder which I have, restarted, and still when I open iTunes a black download button pops up and when I click it, it tells me that I have all these pending downloads. When I click to see what they are, it automatically tries to download all the episodes.

I have purchased movies, but it never tries to make me download any of them. I watch movies and tv shows purchases generally on my Apple TV. And I like that I can view my iCloud purchases in iTunes, and decide to download something if I want to. But I do not like that it keeps trying to make me download all these episodes that I have no reason to want to store on my HD.

Is there a way to perminately tell iTunes to stop trying to download something?

Answer 1

Go to iTunes > Preferences > Store and then untick the 'Always check for available downloads'.

Tick the 'Shows iTunes in the Cloud purchases' too, if you purchased on your Apple TV.

Answer 2

I was having this same problem and I followed the advice from coliff (which I will paste below)

"Go to iTunes > Preferences > Store and then untick the 'Always check for available downloads'.

Tick the 'Shows iTunes in the Cloud purchases' too, if you purchased on your Apple TV."

Except when I got to that point the 'Always check for available downloads' was not checked. I am aware that this may have changed (probably many times) since March of 2014. I found my problem to be that the "Store" category has 3 separate sections (the middle of which is "Automatic Downloads"). I had only one box checked and un-checking that lone box seems to have fixed the problem.

So for anyone having trouble with this in the future I think having any of the boxes under the "Automatic Downloads" section will cause iTunes to start re-downloading whatever purchases fall under the checked box upon restarting the application.

Hope this helps!