YouTube TV expands multiview beyond sports — but you still can’t customize it

Being able to watch multiple things on TV at the same time is obviously a huge convenience for sports fanatics. So it makes sense that YouTube TV focused exclusively on sports when launching its multiview feature. It’s been several months since then, and today, the company says it’s (slowly) expanding multiview to also feature news, business, and weather programming. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that for now, one frustrating catch remains: you’re limited to the preselected multiview groupings that YouTube TV chooses itself and can’t yet customize any of this yourself.

So you can watch a bunch of stuff all at once, but you don’t have control over what’s included. Part of this comes down to the way YouTube TV built multiview; everything is handled on the backend and streamed to you instead of requiring your device to juggle multiple concurrent live streams.

Okay. Sure. But I’m still at a loss for what’s taking a $72.99-per-month service so long to add more flexibility to multiview. PlayStation Vue (RIP) did this just fine back in 2017. I’m starting to wonder if there are weird licensing restrictions at play. Customers are already replying to the above tweet asking for the obvious: they want to be able to pick what channels to combine into a multiview session. Make those four rectangles customizable. Why is this so hard?

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Unfortunately, it sounds like nothing’s going to change in the immediate future: YouTube TV customer support tweeted that these new multiview groupings will be rolling out “gradually this summer” after a test phase with a small group of customers. Also worth remembering is that multiview currently remains available only on living room devices and not phones or tablets. But hey, at least it’ll be primed and ready to go for Sunday Ticket in a few months.