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Apple TV’s multiview feature is now live in beta

A new multiview feature — by which you can watch multiple games at one time — has hit the beta track of the Apple TV operating system. It previously was hinted at in code, and it’s now available for actual use.

Again, you’ll have to be on the beta track of the Apple TV operating system for this to work at all, and as of right now, that’s tvOS 16.5. But once it’s enabled, it’s a pretty simple process to add additional games, and flip between any of them using the Siri Remote. It wasn’t immediately clear if Apple’s implementation would be available to other applications, or if it would be kept just within the Apple TV app for now.

Apple TV's multiview feature as seen with Friday Night Baseball.
The Apple TV app now has a multiview feature on Apple TV hardware running the tvOS 16.5 beta. Phil Nickinson/Digital Trends

The immediate effect is that you’re able to watch multiple Major League Soccer matches at once starting this weekend, and Apple also streams a pair of baseball games on Friday night. While sports is the obvious use case for multiview — YouTube TV is said to have its own implementation in the works for NFL Sunday Ticket — you also could see multiview being used by news junkies, for instance (not that we’d recommend anyone consume more than one channel of cable news at a time).

But for now, we’re just talking about Apple’s sports streams.

Turning on multiview is simple — look for the icon that looks like a square with four quadrants. Select it, and you’ll be greeted with the option to add more games. And note in the picture above how you have the option to mix in some MLS Next Pro with Major League Baseball.

Multiview itself isn’t exactly a novel feature, either. Other streaming services have had it in the past, and ESPN currently has enabled it on its Apple TV app.

Phil Nickinson
Phil spent the 2000s making newspapers with the Pensacola (Fla.) News Journal, the 2010s with Android Central and then the…
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