If you love college basketball and can process more than one game at a time, you’re going to go bananas forYouTube TV‘s new multiview feature, which will be rolling out on a limited, early access basis starting March 14. With multiview, you’ll be able to pick up to four channels and see them all simultaneously, with the ability to easily flip the active audio from one to another. The new feature is compatible with any TV-based YouTube TV installations (streaming media players, smart TVs, and game consoles), but it doesn’t yet work on mobile devices or computers.
How to use YouTube TV multiview
If you’re one of the lucky, randomly chosen users, you’ll see an option to watch up to four preselected, different streams at once in your “Top Picks for You” section. After selecting multiview, you may switch audio and captions between streams, and jump in and out of a full-screen view of a game.
It’s all about sports
At the moment, YouTube TV sees multiview as an enhancement of the sports viewing experience, so only sports content will be eligible. YouTube TV has had some big sports wins in 2022, including4K coverage of the Soccer World Cup, and that trend will continue in 2023 thanks to its acquisition of theNFL Sunday Ticket games. However, YouTube TV recentlylost access to MLB Network and the MLB.tv add-on, which reduces the amount of sports content available for multiview in 2023.
What sets YouTube TV’s multiview feature apart from multiview on other platforms like Samsung’s QLED TVs orFuboTV, is that all of the computing power needed to display four separate feeds at once lives in the cloud, on the service’s servers. Typically, multiview is a very computational-heavy task, which is why FuboTV only offers it on theApple TV 4K.
Since YouTube TV’s multiview is effectively presented as a single stream, it can run on much less powerful hardware. Google credits this new technology to YouTube itself. It had been previously developed to letYouTube creators go live together.
