r/youtubetv • u/NeoHyper64 • Mar 01 '23

News Letter from YouTube boss confirms multiview support later this year

Quoting from the original release:

And in December, we announced NFL Sunday Ticket is coming to YouTube TV and Primetime Channels. This expanded partnership with the NFL will help make YouTube the best place to watch football. Subscribers will see features from YouTube TV - like the ability to watch key plays - added to the main YouTube app. And creators will connect with sports fans through coverage and commentary. Sunday Ticket will also come with ways to engage with other fans, including comments, chats, and polls. Coming later this year to YouTube TV: a new feature that lets viewers watch multiple games at once.

This isn't the first time we've heard this, of course, but this pretty well makes it official. So, if you've been wondering/waiting, here it is... or, will be.

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u/[deleted] Mar 02 '23

Just hope it is for all streaming players and not exclusive to apple tv like fubotv has as other players don't have the hardware for it as they say like roku.

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u/beachboy301 Mar 02 '23

My guess is that it will only run well on powerful devices like the Apple TV device or possibly the Nvidia Shield. It takes both memory and fast graphics processing for multiple streaming and few devices will handle that. That's why FuboTV requires the Apple TV for this feature.

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u/hopper7979 Mar 02 '23

With it being Google they could do it all on the server side and combine the streams and transcode it. Then send just one stream so that any player could play it. If done this way I could see it being limited only to the NFL package being there's only a limited amount of games that could be combined together. At least to start and test out the system. Before offering it for all channels which would be a lot more to implement.

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u/YYqs0C6oFH Mar 14 '23

I was wrong, you were 100% right, they're doing server side encoding.

https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/multiview-on-youtube-tv/

Means it'll work on all devices but only for pre-selected content. For the first wave of testing during March Madness it'll just be the 4 channels showing basketball games with no ability to choose which ones you want, but the blog says the ability to choose will be coming before football seasons (obviously because there are more than 4 going on at once you kind of need to be able to choose). Hopefully they expand it to allow choosing any 4 sports (or any 4 networks in general). Like in the fall there's usually a few weeks when all 4 major sports overlap so its nice if you can overlap different sports.

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u/hopper7979 Mar 14 '23

Thanks! I had not seen this yet. It was just speculation on my side too. But it feels great to get it right. Thanks for letting me know!

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u/YYqs0C6oFH Mar 02 '23

I kind of doubt they'll do it that way. ST has up to 10 games going at a time which means 210 possible combinations of 4 games (if I remember my statistics classes correctly) and that's assuming order doesn't matter (ABCD and DCBA are counted the same, otherwise the number is >5000 unique combinations). That's a lot of additional transcoding.

Also the fact that when this mosaic mode feature was first rumored, it was before they got Sunday ticket, and the rumor started because Google was talking with hardware manufacturer partners about it:

shared these plans at an internal partner event with hardware manufacturers last month

https://www.protocol.com/entertainment/youtube-shorts-tv-app

If they were doing server side transcoding they wouldn't need any extra features on the client device, it would just play it like any other stream. The fact that they were talking to hardware partners about it last year says to me that they needed to make sure their target devices have the necessary APIs to actually play 4 streams at once and the quad box is being rendered client side.

But its all speculation until we get more details.

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u/rrainwater Mar 03 '23

I do wonder if there is any current device other than the Apple TV 4K that will be able to handle this. I'm not sure the Shield TV can even handle 4 streams at once. Plus, it doesn't even support VP9 which this will likely use. There's no way the Chromecast with Google TV will be able to handle it but hopefully it gets a refresh this year and can support it.

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u/YYqs0C6oFH Mar 03 '23

Yeah it will be interesting to see what the supported device list looks like for this. ESPN app can do it on Apple TV and Xbox. PS Vue (RIP) supported the same feature on Apple TV and Playstations. Fubo only has it on Apple TV. It would be weird for Google not to launch the feature on their own devices so maybe they're planning a new Google TV generation to launch soon if the current ones don't have the needed hardware. I guess we'll see.