With the increasing price of terrestrial TV plans, many users have looked to online streaming services to get a better deal for roughly the same content. But the grass isn’t always greener on the other side, as increased costs to run these services have caused monthly prices to balloon. YouTube TV subscribers experienced this pain back in March when the service hiked up its price from $65 to $73 per month. In the days following the price increase, many users complained, but YouTube threw users a bone by releasing multiview to the masses during its broadcast of the March Madness tournament. Now, the company is expanding the multiview feature, going beyond sports content to include news, weather, and more.
The feature was first posted to the YouTube TV Twitter account and then picked up by 9to5Google. While multiview is a neat feature, allowing users to view multiple broadcasts simultaneously, it hasn’t really been fully fleshed out, being limited to special events like the recent NCAA tournament. Of course, that all changes today, with the company rolling out a test, giving users more options for multiview content. Now, if you’re itching to try this out, be warned, it’s only being rolled out in a limited fashion.
But YouTube said it would roll the streams out gradually over the next few months, with a full rollout planned before the end of summer. If you hope to multiview different channels of your choice, you will be disappointed, as the test only supports pre-defined multiview streams. For now, users must be content with pre-defined multiview streams that will mix and match weather, news, sports, and other content. Also, for now, this experience is limited to streaming devices and TVs. You cannot enable this feature on a tablet or smartphone.
Of course, this is just the start of good things to come, and hopefully, in the near future, users will be able to create their own channel pairings. But in an effort to not get ahead of itself, YouTube is being cautious, which I’m sure many subscribers can appreciate. While these trials are important, perhaps one of its largest multiview tests will come later this year when it rolls out broadcasts for NFL Sunday Ticket.