Home sharing difficulties

This shouldn’t be this hard. I’ve been trying to set up my adult son with an Apple TV unit connected to his TV set. I bought a movie through iTunes recently (it’s the latest Tarantino flick) and he would like to see it on his own tv setup. He’s using an ATV3 and we’ve tried as much as we know. I even placed a call to Apple and got the emailed links to various Apple documents that explain how easy this can be. I sent the invite to him, got the acceptance, did the logon along with the two factor authentication, and still he cannot access this movie from my Apple account. I think I’ve gone through most of the Apple online documents with no results.

By the way I also tried adding his Apple ID account to the ATV account in Settings/Users and Accounts but that became a circular route of two factor authentication where nothing really happened. What am I missing?

The Apple TV 3 was never designed for Apple’s new 2FA code entry after the password, so the trick is to add the 6 digit code that you get directly to the end of the password field. So, if the AppleID is “jdoe@icloud.com” and the password for that account is “monkey”, after trying that once you’ll get the prompt on a trusted device; let’s say that the code is “987321”. You’d try the login again with “jdoe@icloud.com” and use the password “monkey987321”. Try to be quick, though; the 6 digit codes do have a timed expiration (one minute?)

See if that works.

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That’s outstanding information, Doug. Thank you. As it turns out I just happen to have a spare ATV4 on hand. My son stayed with the ATV3 because that’s what he had hooked up. I’ve encouraged him to install the 4. Progress report to follow.

We installed the ATV4 and that solved the problem. The ATV is still in my account but now he has access to my purchased movies and my small jazz collection. That’s all we really wanted.