Breaking: YouTube TV Launches Multiview for WNBA League Pass; Will Feature Be Available for NFL Preseason?

YouTube TV has been toying around with its Multiview feature for the past four months as the live TV streaming service prepares for the true test of NFL season. September will mark the platform’s first year as the home of NFL Sunday Ticket which comes over having lived nearly its entire existence as a DIRECTV product. YouTube has thus far only made the feature available for special sporting events and on limited news channels, but it is now rolling it out in an effort to get fans even more sports coverage.

YouTube TV has not yet announced whether the mercurial Multiview feature will be available for college football season, but it will be a cornerstone of the service’s NFL coverage. So, in preparation for the start of football, on Friday night, the service announced that it would be rolling it out for another sports league.

The live streamer announced on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, that the picture-in-picture option is now available for subscribers to the WNBA League Pass. The out-of-market package is very similar to Sunday Ticket in that it is available to both YouTube TV customers and a la carte service as a Primetime Channel. This could be a final test for YouTube TV engineers to make sure that Multiview works across both versions of the add-on.

we’ve officially launched our multiview feature for WNBA League Pass subscribers on YouTube TV & YouTube (w/ Primetime Channels) 🏀

enjoy multiview streams while watching WNBA games on smart TVs & streaming devices!

📺 more here: https://t.co/nXtXkqdZou

— TeamYouTube (@TeamYouTube) July 29, 2023

YouTube first launched the Multiview feature for the Men’s and Women’s NCAA Basketball Tournaments in March and since has deployed it for the NFL Draft and news, sports, and weather coverage. The feature allows viewers to watch combinations of up to four preselected channels, but does not yet provide the option to pick which feeds you want to watch.

The issue preventing YouTube from allowing that functionality is the fact that it is incredibly difficult to provide enough power without a streaming device. Since YouTube TV is running exclusively as an app on connected and smart TVs, the service instead opts to put multiple channels into a single feed so that it can stream more easily. YouTube’s live-streaming competitor Fubo is the only service that currently offers a customizable version of the feature, but it is only available to subscribers who have an Apple TV device as the hardware provides the requisite power to be able to stream individual feeds. Before it was sunset, PlayStation Vue also offered the customizable feature as it was available via the powerful PlayStation video game console.

While the Multiview functionality is a nice addition to YouTube’s service, there have been obvious areas of improvement since it launched in March. Even though the service has added new viewing options, it is still more limited than many customers would like it to be.

However, as the football season approaches, YouTube TV will need to ensure that it has Multiview in the best possible working order. Originally billed as “Mosaic Mode,” the feature was targeted as part of the eventual launch of NFL Sunday Ticket. YouTube has not confirmed whether or not it will add additional functionality to the feature for football season, but enabling it for WNBA League Pass customers seems like it will be the final test before the NFL regular season kicks off.

The feature will almost certainly not be available for NFL preseason games as those contests are not included as part of the Sunday Ticket offerings and they are predominantly only broadcast locally, meaning that football fans are blacked out from watching most games. So, it might bear keeping a closer eye on the WNBA Multiview rollout, because the version that we get for those games is likely to be very similar to the one we see for Sunday Ticket.