NFL Sunday Ticket’s move from DirecTV to YouTube TV was highly anticipated last year, although the huge price tag was a nasty surprise. Maybe some new streaming goodies will help attract a few more buyers this year. One of these is a new multiview interface, which allows users to choose up to four simultaneous games to watch at once.
Multiview has been around for a while, but last year you could only choose from pre-selected combinations of games. The improved interface, available on smart TVs and mobile devices, allows fans to choose two, three or four games to combine in one view.
It reminds me of that bit in Back to the Future II where Marty Jr. loads its own combination of channels in an instant – why not turn this into an “OK Google” command?
Sunday Ticket, which offers access to all Sunday NFL games outside your local market, will still be a pricey proposition for football fans. It costs $479 per year the cheapest way possible, and that’s what it is without the YouTube TV basic subscription that gets you your local team’s games, plus ESPN for Monday Night Football and local channels for some Thursday games. According to the YouTube blog post, some pre-selected multiview streams will be available to YouTube TV subscribers without purchasing a Sunday Ticket. Football fans outside the US have access to much cheaper packages.
Other upgrades for the upcoming season include integration with NFL Fantasy and Yahoo Fantasy leagues, ‘spoiler mode’ that hides scores for certain games until you can watch a recorded version, a user-selectable delay that reduces the number of buffer breaks, and a new hotkey to quickly skip to the last channel and switch between games with one button.
