If you love college basketball and can process more than one game at a time, you’ll be in for a treat with YouTube TV’s new multi-view feature, rolling out with limited early access starting March 14. You’ll be able to select up to four channels and view them all simultaneously, with the ability to easily switch active audio from one to another. The new feature is compatible with any TV-based YouTube TV setup (streaming media players, smart TVs, and game consoles), but doesn’t yet work on mobile devices or computers.
Initially, multi-view will only be available to select YouTube TV users, who will be chosen at random. But Google says the goal is to include all subscribers by the time the NFL football season begins in the fall. Another limitation, at least for now, is that YouTube TV will pre-select the multi-view channels you can choose from. At launch, only channels that carry NCAA tournament games will be included in that shortlist.
How to use multi-view on YouTube TV
If you’re one of the lucky random users, you’ll see an option to watch up to four different pre-selected streams at once in your “Top Picks for You” section. After selecting multi-view, you can switch audio and subtitles between streams, and switch in and out of a full-screen view of a game.
It’s all about sports
At the moment, YouTube TV sees multi-view as an enhancement to the sports viewing experience, so only sports content will be eligible. YouTube TV has had big sports wins in 2022, including 4K coverage of the Soccer World Cup, and that trend will continue in 2023 thanks to its acquisition of NFL Sunday Ticket games. However, YouTube TV recently lost access to the MLB Network and the MLB.tv add-on, reducing the amount of sports content available for multiview in 2023.
The current sports focus aside, the service remains open to the idea that its subscribers want to choose from other types of content. “We are always exploring different ways for members to use our features across the variety of content YouTube TV has to offer,” a spokesperson told Digitals Trend via email. “We currently don’t have a timeline to share when multi-view customization will be available.”
What sets YouTube TV’s multi-view feature apart from multi-view on other platforms, like Samsung’s QLED TVs or FuboTV, is that all the computing power needed to display four separate sources at once is in the cloud. , on the servers of the service. Multiview is typically a very computational task, which is why FuboTV only offers it on Apple TV 4K.
Since YouTube TV’s multi-view is effectively rendered as a single stream, it can run on much less powerful hardware. Google attributes this new technology to YouTube itself. It had previously been developed to allow YouTube creators to go live together.
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