We are facing the dame issue too. Opened an issue in Feedback assistant when tvOS was still in beta, but they are not able to reproduce it with their test stream.

We have multiple live streams, for some of them, the user has the ability to seek backward up to 4 hours before live edge. For those streams, we are able to pause the playback even when the player is very close to the live edge. For the other streams, only the latest 40 seconds are included in the manifest, and we are not able to pause it. So we think that the issue has something to do with that, because it's the only difference between the stream we can pause and the one where we see the issue. Are you able to reproduce using this Apple test stream? https://ll-hls-test.cdn-apple.com/llhls4/ll-hls-test-04/multi.m3u8. On my side, I was not able to reproduce with this one, and when looking in the manifest, it seems to include the last minute + 5 seconds.

Sure, we already opened a bug report back in September, just before the launch of tvOS 18. Here's the FB number: FB15103008.