YouTube TV brings multiview feature to sports fans

The most recent new feature launched by YouTube TV has been specifically designed for sports fans. To provide this incredibly passionate audience with the best viewing experience on TV, the streaming service announced that it has added a new multiview feature allowing them to switch audio and captions between streams.The new feature is only available in early access for the moment, so if you don’t see that feature yet in your YouTube TV app, then this is why. The streaming service revealed that “some members” will start to see a new option to watch up to four pre-selected, different streams at once in their “Top Picks for You” section.

As mentioned earlier, this will allow select YouTube TV members to switch audio and captions between streams, as well as jump in and out of a fullscreen view of a game. In development for quite a while, the new multiview feature joins a slew of improvements YouTube TV introduced in the last couple of years, including key plays, fantasy view, and 4K streaming.

YouTube TV’s multiview feature has been designed to work even on devices that have less processing power. According to German Cheung (Engineering lead, YouTube TV), the company decided to move the entire processing requirements to happen on YouTube’s servers, allowing subscribers to use the feature regardless of what device they’re using.

This is possible because your device will see only one life feed instead of two or four, so it won’t need any processing power to be able to playback multiple streams at once. It’s an ingenious approach that required some resources investments from YouTube TV, so let’s hope it will work as intended.

If you’re not among the early adopters, be patient as YouTube TV announced that the multiview feature will be gradually rolled out while the company gathers feedback from subscribers. More importantly, the feature will continue to be fine-tuned and refined, but expect more functionality to be added too, including the option to customize multiview streams.