Apple TV Xfinity Stream app "This device can only access Xfinity Stream on your in-home Xfinity WiFi."

The past several days, I've been trying to troubleshoot the "Welcome! This device can only access Xfinity Stream on your in-home Xfinity WiFi. Use the app on your smartphone, tablet, or laptop to watch on the go, any time you like." error that appears after trying to sign in to the Xfinity Stream app on my Apple TV.

Details of my setup

• 2017 AppleTV 4K
• tvOS 18.2
• Customer-owned modem (confirmed both via the chatbot and via an Xfinity rep that I have the right modem model number and MAC address associated with my account)
• Located at the primary and only address on my Xfinity account
• Connected via Ethernet (no wifi involved)
• Xfinity Stream works fine on my phone, iPad, and computer
• Internet-only service from Xfinity (no TV service)

After multiple phone calls, multiple resets, multiple times through the chatbot troubleshooting steps, I finally got to a second-tier Xfinity rep who explained that the issue is apparently that I don't have television service on my account.

What follows is a little bit of a rant, but I'm writing it in the hopes that someone from Xfinity might see it and:

(1) confirm that what I've been told re. TV services is in fact correct and

(2) if that is correct, PLEASE fix the error message and troubleshooting steps, as I've wasted multiple hours trying to fix this.

More details:

The tier 2 tech support rep I finally got in touch with (the second one I talked to) told me that it's fine to watch Xfinity Stream on my computer, on my phone, or on my iPad, but I can't watch it via the AppleTV app unless I have TV service on my account. 

What's totally strange is that the error message in the AppleTV app says nothing about this. It says just "Welcome! This device can only access Xfinity Stream on your in-home Xfinity WiFi. Use the app on your smartphone, tablet, or laptop to watch on the go, any time you like."

If the issue is really that it won't work on the AppleTV if you don't have TV service, why doesn't the error message say that? After all, I'm logged in by this point, so the Xfinity systems already know whether or not I've got TV service. It'd be so simple to just modify that error message to something like "Welcome! This device can only access Xfinity Stream via Apple TV if you have TV service as a part of your Xfinity services. Use the app on your smartphone, tablet, or laptop to watch, any time you like."

Or Xfinity could make that a part of the documentation related to the error at https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/tvapp00101 or  https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/xfinity-tv-app-unable-to-connect ? Or a part of the Xfinity Stream troubleshooting steps the chatbot goes through when it checks and resets the account, asks for the modem's MAC address, and many other steps?

Any one of those would have saved me, and Xfinity's support staff, hours of time.

This "no Apple TV app unless you have TV service" restriction also really doesn't make any sense. I would understand that the services I could access via the Xfinity Stream app would be more limited because I don't have TV service, but I should still be able to do things like use the AppleTV Xfinity Stream app to do things like play movies I've rented, and similar. And I can easily just plug my computer or phone into my TV, so that's not anything, either.

Hopefully someone from Xfinity is monitoring this and can respond, and hopefully this post will also help others who have gone down this rabbit hole.

I'm also tagging @MatJV, @peter_bernard, @lh30, and @user_eu08li  as their thread from October was a very similar issue and I thought they might want to see this one. I hope it helps (and apologies for bothering you if not!)