As explained by YouTube:
“YouTube TV is home for sports fans and we want to ensure that we offer our members the best sports viewing experience on TV. Over the years, we’ve added features and partnerships that help bring viewers into their favorite games — like key plays, fantasy view, 4K streaming and soon, NFL Sunday Ticket. And now, just in time for March Madness, we’re launching early access for the ability for fans to watch multiple streams at once.”
The new option will enable YouTube TV viewers to consumer multiple shows at once – which, in our age of evolving attention spans, will likely be of huge value for many users.
YouTube has also seen a big increase in people watching YouTube content on their home TV sets, which has been its fastest-growing usage category over the past five years. In line with this, YouTube also recently added an enhanced Shorts viewing mode for TV sets, as it looks to provide more functionality and options for those consuming content on the bigger screen.
Multi-view is the next evolution, and as YouTube notes, sports fans will be the main target of the new push.
“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.”
It could be a big addition, which will also impact the way YouTube ads are shown as the roll-out evolves.
YouTube says that it will be introducing multiview gradually, and collecting feedback from subscribers along the way. It also notes that it will be looking to bring the multiview experience to the main YouTube app across TVs later this year.
It could be a big differentiator for YouTube’s Connected TV offering, which could have significant implications for future viewing behaviors.
You can read more about YouTube’s Multiview, and the technological development of the option, here.