NFL fans can customize YouTube multi-game streams

NFL Sunday Ticket’s move from DirecTV to YouTube TV last year was highly anticipated, though its massive price tag was a nasty surprise. Maybe some new streaming goodies will help attract a few more buyers this year. One of them is a new multiview interface, which will allow 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 pick from pre-selected combinations of games. The improved interface, available on smart TVs and mobile devices, will let fans choose two, three, or four games to combine into a single view.

It reminds me of that bit in Back to the Future II when Marty Jr. loads up his own combo of channels on the fly — hey, why not make this an “OK Google” command?

Sunday Ticket, which offers access to all Sunday NFL games outside of your local market, will still be a pricey proposition for football fans. It’s $479 a year at the cheapest, and that’s without the YouTube TV base plan 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 buying 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 will cut down on buffering interruptions, and a new shortcut to quickly jump to the last channel for one-button swapping between games.