The multiview feature on YouTube TV has been a subject of hot debate since its (soft) introduction during the 2023 NCAA Tournament. There’s been a lot of praise for the feature across college basketball, the NFL, and more, but also complaints, especially around how it hasn’t let users fully select their own group of feeds, but rather offers them choices of preset combinations.
That’s been a particular challenge for those who want to watch games from different competitions at the same time, such as the NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tournaments. The good news for those fans is that YouTube TV plans to make that more possible soon, as part of a wider expansion of their multiview offerings. The bad news is that this won’t kick in until the Sweet 16.
Jacob Feldman broke that news Friday in a piece at Sportico. That piece includes YouTube TV’s argument on why they can’t offer fully-customizable multiview, with senior product manager Brianne Mirecki telling Feldman via email the service actually has to provide different multiview packages for each local affiliate (which is part of why this still wasn’t fully-customizable even for NFL Sunday Ticket around the games on a viewer’s local CBS and Fox affiliates last fall). Feldman also writes that each multiview “package” is actually a single feed rather than a composite, with that decision made to help this work on devices with a range of computing power (including mobile devices, which multiview was expanded to last year).
Feldman writes that “Even a web giant like Google-owned YouTube is not ready to serve a completely unlimited array of multiview selections. At least not yet.” That could potentially lead to an interesting argument with more data: how much more would it cost Google to create more single feeds of more combinations, or to make an option available for user-selected composites without regard to device computing power quality (similar to their setting for reduced broadcast latency at potentially-lower quality), and how worthwhile would that be for them in terms of either increased YouTube TV subscriptions or greater customer satisfaction and retention (which would be notable for a service that’s had repeated price hikes, including to $82.99 a month in January)? From the outside, though, all we can conclude is that Google’s internal numbers are telling them that’s not worth the investment yet.
While Mirecki didn’t specifically speak to the financial decision to not yet offer that full customization, though, she did offer some interesting quotes to Feldman on other fronts. Here are some of those:
A team of sports fans armed with usage data (as well as feedback on social media) determines which games will be paired together. “We have to strike the right balance between what viewers want with our capacity,” Mirecki said.
…“We are always refining our approach to improve the combinations that are available to our viewers,” Mirecki said.
In particular, Mirecki said YouTube TV is focused on improving its backend tech to increase the number of multiview options that can be offered simultaneously, “so that viewers will have more choices this upcoming NFL season.”
The NFL season is potentially much easier to solve in terms of brute-force creation of single feeds, as there are far fewer games at any one point. And that’s why Sunday Ticket multiview was largely in place last fall, albeit with those hangups around users’ local Fox and CBS feeds. Even with those, it is possible that YouTube TV could present feeds with every conceivable combination of NFL games with an improvement of backend technology and dedicated computing power.
But the issue still remains for those who want to watch the NFL as well as something else (and there have been lots of notable other sports options on NFL game days, from college football during overlaps to the NBA to NASCAR to women’s college sports), and a brute-force provider-side approach cannot create every possible multiview an individual fan might want. And that particularly shows up during March Madness, with that branding now also applied to the increasingly-popular women’s tournament as well as the men’s one, and with an increasing number of people who want to watch games from both those NCAA tournaments (as well as other college basketball postseason tournaments).
YouTube TV and its “team of sports fans armed with usage data” certainly can predict some of the combinations that people will want to watch. And it is positive that they plan to offer men’s and women’s combo packages, albeit negative that they’re not doing so until the Sweet 16. But the sheer combination math here (for example, there are 2,598,960 possible five-card poker hand combinations from a 52-card deck, with order not mattering; that would drop to 1,820 for a similar n-choose-k setup of picking four multiview feeds from 16 simultaneous sports options, but that’s still a lot!), mixed with the individuality of sports fans, shows provider-side multiview curation will not get close to offering every combination fans want. And that’s especially true at times like March Madness, where what any individual fan wants to watch varies dramatically.
Given that, there may be room for further discussions of provider decisions to offer multiview as a variety of single curated feeds rather than user-selected individual composites. Yes, that likely works better on devices with limited computing power, such as phones (and mobile viewing is certainly important, especially for events like March Madness with significant action during traditional workdays). And maybe it’s a good enough approximation of user choice to work for many users, especially in a single-league selection like the NFL. But the overarching move in sports broadcasting is towards increased feed personalization, which everyone from Genius Sports’ Steve Bornstein to ESPN’s Jimmy Pitaro has discussed lately. And that’s never going to be fully solved by provider-side curation.