YouTube TV’s new Multiview feature for NCAA Tournament basketball is awesome

Over the weekend, you may be aware of a little tournament is going on that has multiple games happening all at the same time. The term March Madness is incredibly apt for the yearly NCAA Tournament if you are into men’s college hoops, and for millions of viewers, frequent switching between games is simply part of the process of keeping up with the latest crazy thing happening in a season-ending tournament. In this sort of environment, wild stuff happens and as a basketball fan, you want to watch as much of it live as you can.

Enter YouTube TV Multiview. Rolling out to select users over the coming weeks and to all users over the coming months, Multiview is capable of streaming four individual channels at once, and it does so in a very interesting way. Instead of relying on your local hardware to render 4 concurrent streams, YouTube TV does the rendering legwork on the backend and sends a single stream to your device for consumption so that any device can handle the workload.

During early access, some members will begin to see an option to watch up to four pre-selected, different streams at once in their “Top Picks for You” section. After selecting multiview, viewers will be able to switch audio and captions between streams, and jump in and out of a fullscreen view of a game. Multiview joins our suite of features for sports fans and we’re looking forward to continuing to improve the experience and introducing it to all YouTube TV subscribers over the next several months.

via the YouTube Blog

This means the Multiview streams that you have access to are limited to what YouTube TV puts together for you for now, and that’s clearly a limitation in the early phases. However, that limitation will eventually give way to users being able to build their own, custom Multiview streams in the future. For now, it seems the start of the NFL season is the goal for a full rollout of the feature to the YouTube TV app as a whole, coinciding with the arrival of Sunday NFL Ticket on Google’s television platform.

We’re introducing multiview gradually and collecting feedback from subscribers along the way. These insights will help inform the experience as we get closer to the NFL football season kicking off this fall. Over time, we’ll refine and add more functionality to multiview, including the option to customize your own multiview streams. And, as you might have already guessed, we’re looking to bring this multiview experience to the main YouTube app across TVs later this year.

via the YouTube Blog

For now, enjoying the pre-selected feeds has been an absolute pleasure. With a larger screen in the room, you can sit back and enjoy multiple games at once, selecting which audio you want to hear by simply moving the selector over that particular feed. If the other games become a bore, you can easily click on the game of interest and it will move to a full-screen view for a more-immersive experience. There was no setup and no real work to be done to immediately enjoy the benefits, and it was wildly helpful this weekend with so many games on so many different channels.

Other than sporting events, I’m not sure of the other benefits this feature will bring to users, but I can tell you as a fan of basketball, golf, football, and baseball, this will definitely come in handy many times throughout the year. If things are ready by the start of the NFL season, Sunday game time could be a whole lot more interesting for many people on YouTube TV. It’s an exciting change and one that I think will be a huge benefit for users on all sorts of hardware down the road.