NFL Sunday Ticket's New Multiview Is a Step Forward, but Is Still Limited

A true, complete multiview option has long been something akin to the holy grail for sports fans. From the days of picture-in-picture features on cable and satellite services to fully customizable options on Fubo’s Apple TV app and the now defunct PlayStation Vue, the most successful attempts in the past have all relied on the viewer having a specific type of set-top device to handle the computing power required to deliver multiple feeds at a time. However, as streaming technology moves away from specific, proprietary hardware and more to universal dongles and smart TVs, this multi-screen sports dream has become increasingly difficult to attain. Last week, YouTube TV announced the latest evolution in its ongoing multiview experiment which gets sports fans closer to full control than they’ve ever been before without being tied to a specific device, but there are still limitations.

Key Details:

YouTube TV has announced the next iteration of its multiview feature for the NFL season.
While you will be able to build any combination of out-of-market games you’d like, local games will be limited.
The issue with offering a fully customizable multiview is one of computing power.

With the start of the NFL season coming next week, YouTube TV will be allowing NFL Sunday Ticket subscribers to build a fully customizable multiview stream of every game available on the out-of-market games package. A YouTube spokesperson confirmed to The Streamable that every possible combination of two, three, or four Sunday Ticket games will be available for multiview creation.

“Users will be able to make every possible combination of Sunday Ticket games,” YouTube’s rep said.

However, the perhaps under-the-radar caveat to this is statement is that there will be one or two games in every Sunday broadcast window that are not part of Sunday Ticket. These locally broadcast games will inherently limit the complete customizability of YouTube TV’s NFL multiview function. Since Sunday Ticket only includes the out-of-market games, there will be one or two games in both the 1 p.m. and 4:30 p.m. ET windows, depending on the market and the weekend, that are not included. These games will be available on each viewer’s individual CBS and Fox affiliates, so subscribers to both NFL Sunday Ticket and YouTube TV will have some multiview options, but they won’t be complete.

***NFL Sunday Ticket will allow fans to build their own multiview combination of out-of-market games.***

While Sunday Ticket subscribers will be able to build their ideal multiview of out-of-market games, what they are actually doing is selecting from multi-game feeds that have already been constructed by YouTube. With a finite number of national feeds in each broadcast window, that is relatively easy to do, but when you begin to factor in all of the local affiliates airing games around the country, it becomes technologically harder to build every possible multiview combination.

“Every unique combination watched in multiview uses limited data center and computational resources,” the YouTube rep told The Streamable. “Because each region has unique, local content, we are constrained on the number of combinations we can create that include local feeds.”

The data center and computational resources are what have made multi-feed broadcasts difficult for streaming services. Sports-focused live-streaming platform Fubo is the only major streamer currently offering a fully customizable multiview feature. However, the company is only able to do that for subscribers who watch via an Apple TV device, because that hardware provides the additional technological power to combine four unique feeds into a single screen.

YouTube’s multiview feature differs from this construction in a fundamental way. Instead of allowing users to combine up to four different feeds on their own, YouTube pre-selects two, three, or four broadcasts and combines them into a single feed on the back end, essentially making them the equivalent of any other channel in terms of the power required to stream.

Related: Score Big With $85 Off YouTube TV and NFL Sunday Ticket

***NFL Sunday Ticket makes clear that not every combination of games will be available to stream.***

Therefore, it becomes exponentially more difficult for YouTube to construct every possible combination of games including local broadcasts in each region, since there are 210 designated market areas in the United States. Therefore, the streamer attempts to combine the most popular Sunday Ticket and locally aired games available to build the multiview feeds ahead of time that it believes the most viewers will be interested in watching. So, even as sports fans construct their own combination of games, what they are actually doing is selecting from the predetermined feeds built by YouTube.

“Our teams try to select the best combinations based on expected popularity,” the YouTube rep told The Streamable. “In order to get users into game action as fast as possible, we start multiview streams in advance of user demand. The multiview builder helps users quickly navigate to their preferred combination of games.”

As the college football and NFL seasons approach, any improvement in multiview capabilities will likely be appreciated by fans with limited options in this area. However, there is still room for innovation and development before sports fans can truly mix and match all of the games that they want to watch on a single screen.

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