Skip to main content

YouTube TV rolls out multiview: watch up to 4 NCAA games at once

If you love college basketball and can process more than one game at a time, you’re going to go bananas for YouTube 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.

An example of YouTube TV's multiview feature.
Google

Initially, multiview will only be available to select YouTube TV users, who will be chosen at random. But Google says the goal is to include every subscriber by the time NFL football season starts in the fall. Another limitation, at least for now, is that YouTube TV will preselect the multiview channels you can choose. At launch, only channels that carry NCAA tournament games will be included in that preselected list.

Related Videos

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 can 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, including 4K coverage of the Soccer World Cup, and that trend will continue in 2023 thanks to its acquisition of the NFL Sunday Ticket games. However, YouTube TV recently lost access to MLB Network and the MLB.tv add-on, which reduces the amount of sports content available for multiview in 2023.

The present sports focus aside, the service remains open to the idea that its subscribers may want to pick from other kinds 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 don’t currently have a timeline to share for when multiview customization will be available.”

What sets YouTube TV’s multiview feature apart from multiview on other platforms like Samsung’s QLED TVs or FuboTV, 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 the Apple 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 let YouTube creators go live together.

Editors' Recommendations

YouTube TV: plans, pricing, channels, how to cancel, and more
The YouTube TV on a Roku TV.

When you think of streaming video, you think YouTube. And so YouTube TV — Google's live TV streaming service — very much just makes sense for a lot of people. Designed for those who want to cut the cord and ditch their cable or satellite subscriptions (and known in the industry as a multichannel video programming distributor, or MPVD), YouTube TV competes in the same arena as other streaming television services like DirecTV Stream (formerly known as AT&T TV Now and DirecTV Now), Sling TV, FuboTV, and Hulu With Live TV.

And YouTube TV offers a unique mix of features that make it very appealing, so much so that it's now the No. 1 service in the U.S. in terms of the number of paid subscribers, with some 5 million subscribers as of June 2022 — up some 2 million from the last time the service gave an update in October 2020. The popularity is due to several factors. YouTube TV is easy to use. It's got a selection of channels that's competitive with all its rivals. And the YouTube TV price is competitive, too. You're able to watch YouTube TV on pretty much any modern device. And the fact that parent company Alphabet (aka Google) has been marketing the heck out of it the past few years certainly hasn't hurt, either.

Read more
YouTube TV increases its monthly prices by $8 – is now the time to switch?
YouTube TV on Roku.

YouTube TV has raised the price of its monthly subscription by $8, from $65 to $73. The move comes on the heels of its announcement that it will be adding a multiview feature for sports channels. The change in price will hit current subscribers on April 18, however, the streaming service, which is owned by Google, has already started charging new customers the higher price.

It's been a while since YouTube TV last raised its prices. That was in 2020, when the streaming service increased subscriptions from $50 to $65. When the service first launched in 2017, it only cost $35 per month.

Read more
The first Roku-made televisions are now available at Best Buy
Roku Select Series television.

Roku today announced that its first slate of Roku Select and Roku Plus Series televisions — the first sets to actually be made by Roku — are now available exclusively at Best Buy. The first 11 models are meant to be affordable options not unlike the Roku TVs made by the company's manufacturing partners. (Those partners, so far as we know, will still make their own Roku TVs.)

The Plus Series is the more advanced of the two options, with QLED screens at 55, 65, and 75 inches. Those prices hit $649, $749, and $1,199, respectively.

Read more