NFL Sunday Ticket Multi-View Technical Questions

[PGage]

I wonder if anyone here opted for NFL Sunday Ticket this season on YoutubeTV (I believe also available through YouTube)? I did - I wont describe in detail my experience, suffice it to say that the NFL is very wise not to allow partial refunds for in-season cancellations. I do have a technical question related to this package, which requires some set up.

One of the reasons I decided to give ST a try (after paying for it for several seasons years ago when we had DirectTV) was the “Multiview” feature YoutubeTV was promoting. This allows the viewer to watch a 2,3 or 4 box screen with multiple games.

 I failed to do my due diligence on this feature (I think they rolled it out during the March Madness coverage last Spring), and did not realize that they do not let the viewer select the games to put in the boxes - instead the viewer selects from a series of pre-created multiple screen options. This would not be a problem, except that I find every week there are some combinations of games that are just not available, and most weeks it seems my optimum combination is one of these. 

And so my questions: Does anyone know of a technical reason why this might be? It is not due to blackout rules - I am in the Bay Area TV market, and the games I want to watch in the multiview never include the 49ers, or even the Las Vegas Raiders, and the game I can not match with the other 2 or 3 is still a game I can watch in single screen via Sunday Ticket.

The Red Zone IMO continues to be the best way to watch the NFL, at a fraction of the cost. After the first month I signed back up for RedZone, and watch it together with ST. This has been helpful, as I can now select options where the RZ is one of the screens, so I can spend much of my time with RZ, but then switch over to a game with special interest to watch more continuously if I want (while, nicely, still monitoring all the other games in the RZ screen)*. But even here I notice that there are some games that will not pair with the RZ in the same multi screen option.

I am not complaining - I knew there was a chance ST would not be worth the price when I bought it (still waiting for the option where I can pay just to watch every Ram game) but I am just interested in why it might be that there are some combinations they are not able to put into the Multiscreen (or, why it is not possible to let the viewer select the games they want to put into multiscreen)?

* One drawback is that not surprisingly the RZ is often a little behind the action on the regular feed (and, more surprisingly to me, sometimes they are actually a little ahead of the action on the regular feed), so moving back and forth is not seemless.

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[Tom Wolper]

Jimmy Traina writes a sports media column for SI and he mentioned this at the beginning of the season. The reason, as best he can tell, is that YouTube didn’t tell its programmers to add that capability. When they get enough feedback telling them that people really want it they’ll figure out how to add it.

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[Adam Bowie]

Without seeing exactly what they're doing, I suspect that the reason that you have to select from some pre-selected multiviews is simply technical streaming. 

They're combining the feeds centrally and then encoding a group of four games as a single video feed. While there may be some interactivity within that - highlighting which game's sound you get - the highest bandwidth part of the whole thing is the video, and it's easiest if YouTube compiles those feeds once centrally, and serve that combination to users. This also means that they can be pretty robust in their offer. If they make, say, five combinations available, they only have to worry about each individual game and the five combinations available to viewers. 

The trouble is that there can be a lot of ways to choose 4 games from those being played.

This week there are six early games, meaning that there are 15 different combinations of choosing 4 of them for multiview. (Mathematically, the calculation is nCk - or "n" choose "k", 6C4 in this instance).

Next week I believe there are nine early games, and that means that there are a massive 126 combinations of 4 games!

And even if YouTube encoded each of those 126 combinations, trying to navigate the list as a user would be a nightmare.

Certainly, there's no theoretical reason why they couldn't let users pick their four games and create a bespoke feed for each subscriber - but I suspect that this is a coding challenge and as Tom says, they just didn't crack it in time. And whatever solution they come up with has to work on every platform where YouTube/YouTube TV is available. 

Adam

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[PGage]

I guess I was imagining something more like a suped up version of the old “picture-in-picture” function.

I am confident YouTube is hearing from a large fraction of users that they do want to be able to create their own multiverse, though I am not sure I believe they could not anticipate not only the desire, but that most users would assume it was included.

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