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Content and Service Providers, MVPDs, and other rights holders spend billions on sports rights. Without investing in the viewing experience, the return on those investments may shrink fast.
For decades, all sports broadcasters —traditional and streaming —competed on a common platform with the same fundamental building blocks: live streaming sports to big-screen TVs, basic client-side application controls, and broadcast copies of live sports content. This uniform foundation has defined the competitive landscape for subscriber experiences.
But that has changed. Multiview, or the ability to display more than one channel on the screen, has emerged as the defining feature of a premium sports experience. YouTube TV, which introduced universal multiview in 2023, is leading the charge, with Tom’s Guide noting that multiview was YouTube TV’s “best new feature.” Though initially YouTube TV only offered preset channel configurations, the service quickly advanced to Build Your Own Multiview (BYOMV), enabling customers to combine any four live channels.
In early 2025, Comcast extended multiview to its Xfinity X1 platform for March Madness, enabling subscribers to follow multiple NCAA tournament games on one screen. In May, Formula 1 followed with a premium BYOMV service.
Late summer 2025 saw a flurry of multiview announcements, many timed to coincide with the start of an upcoming sporting season. As reported in The Verge, “ESPN rolled out multiview streaming on major smart TV platforms, enabling the viewing of up to four games simultaneously. In the UK, Sky Sports introduced multiview for the 2025–26 Premier League, “allowing fans to watch up to four matches simultaneously.” This followed Peacock’s multiview offering that “allows fans to watch four matches simultaneously on a split screen,” complete with selectable audio and focus controls. FuboTV also expanded its offering with a customizable multiview beta on Roku that lets subscribers “select and stream up to four live channels simultaneously.”
In less than two years, multiview has jumped from a limited feature on select devices to a mainstream capability across cable, streaming, and premium sports services. That rapid adoption underscores the shift. Multiview is no longer an experiment or a differentiator. It has become the baseline expectation that defines what “premium” sports viewing means.
Multiview isn’t a gimmick. Multiview fulfills the obvious demand from fans who increasingly pair sports with fantasy and betting. Fantasy sports involve choosing players from multiple teams, which means that multiple games are important to fantasy viewers. The same is true for the betting public, who typically wager on multiple games simultaneously, either directly or through parlays. Morning Consult reported that “nearly half of Gen Z sports fans have engaged in sports betting in the past year, compared with just 28% of all U.S. adults.” This younger audience is also more likely to follow multiple teams, players, and leagues at once, making BYOMV ideally suited for their fragmented but high-intensity viewing habits.
This shift in fan behavior has created enormous stakes for all sports broadcasters. Sports are widely considered “the glue holding together the traditional bundle” for traditional media and vMVPDs. According to a July 2025 Parks Associates report, “sports fans are among the most valuable viewers, spending an average of $88 per month on streaming services, compared with $64 per month by those who don’t watch sports”). Harmonic points out that “personalization strategies such as multiview, real-time stats overlays, and server-side ad insertion” directly increase viewer engagement and ad revenue. More minutes watched across more feeds means more ad inventory and more opportunities for contextual or targeted advertising, creating measurable ROI beyond subscriber retention.
Sports experiences are so vital to subscriber revenue that they can’t be boiled down to a simple feature-for-feature competition. Providers need a long-term platform strategy for personalization, and Build-Your-Own Multiview (BYOMV) as part of that overall strategy represents the next step in the journey, creating a foundation for richer, AI-supported, and interactive experiences.
Introducing Tessera
Fortunately, the technology to quickly deliver multiview is now practical. Skreens’ Tessera™ platform is a patented, cloud-agnostic service that provides the fastest path to offering engaging, immersive, subscriber-driven multiviews to ANY device or TV. Tessera enables dynamic channel creation with server-side multiviews created in real-time with up to 4K/60 resolution, while requiring no client SDK and working with your existing infrastructure, including cable, satellite, and streaming.
In short, Tessera is a server-side BYOMV service for MVPDs and content streaming providers. Tessera allows subscribers to select up to four channels to watch simultaneously, powered by server-side processing that ensures BYOMV works across smart TVs, mobile devices, and streaming boxes without demanding high-end hardware. Tessera delivers ultra-low latency with processing times under 200 milliseconds and scales for significant events like March Madness or the Super Bowl. As a server-side solution, Tessera can be implemented in weeks, not months.
Younger fans have grown accustomed to watching on mobile not only for convenience but for richer interactive options. BYOMV brings those same capabilities back to the living room, making the big screen once again the center of the sports experience.
With the world’s largest vMVPD offering multiview, the world’s most popular sports network embracing it, and flagship events like the Olympics, Formula 1, and the Premier League showcasing it, multiview is rapidly becoming a must-have feature. Services that fail to deliver it will inevitably be seen as offering a “second-best” experience.
What’s the market for the second-best sports experience? In a word, declining.
(Note: this post is sponsored by Skreens).
