NFL Sunday Ticket’s move from DirecTV to YouTube TV last year was highly anticipated, though its hefty price tag came as a surprise. Perhaps new streaming products will help attract a few more buyers this year. One of them is a new multi-view interface, which will let users choose up to four simultaneous games to watch at once.
Multiview mode has been around for a while, but last year you could only choose a combination of pre-selected games. The improved interface, available on smart TVs and mobile devices, will allow fans to choose two, three, or four games to combine into a single view.
This reminds me of that bit in Back to the Future Part II where Marty Jr. loads his own string combination on the fly. Hey, why not make it an “OK Google” command?
Sunday Ticket, which offers access to every Sunday NFL game outside your local market, will remain an expensive proposition for football fans. It costs $479 per year at its cheapest, and that’s without YouTube TV’s basic plan lets you watch your local team’s games, plus ESPN for Monday Night Football and local channels for select Thursday games. According to YouTube’s blog post, some pre-selected multi-view streams will be available to YouTube TV subscribers without purchasing Sunday Ticket. Football fans outside the US have access to much cheaper plans.
Other enhancements 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 will reduce buffering interruptions and a new shortcut to quickly skip to the last channel for one-button game changes.
