So it seems that it's Channels, I say that because here's what I'm doing...
I take my Verizon TVE channels m3u and save it... http://192.168.1.13:8089/devices/TVE-Verizon/channels.m3u as a local file.
I copy/paste it as an M3U source and wipe out everything other than the stream and channel-id, name and title and give it my local verizon chno, then I can remap to my existing providers epg. So in the end it looks like this...
#EXTINF:-1 channel-id="6000" tvg-chno="504" tvg-logo="https://tmsimg.fancybits.co/assets/s28717_h3_ba.png?w=360&h=270" tvg-name="WNBCDT" group-title="HD",NBC
http://192.168.1.13:8089/devices/TVE-Verizon/channels/6000/hls/master.m3u8?
Now I get all my free channels mapped correctly, nothing illegal, works awesome and uses no additional services or hacks to get it working, just channels feeding channels...
It still drops the feed once I start a new one after like 30 seconds, then i have to exit the blank screen, go back in, and it either says playback failed, or it works, if it fails, i exit the channel and go back in, and then it works. So the streams from channels tve to channels m3u WORK, but they're inconsistently working on first load, but not always, sometimes first load works... it's odd.