Multiview and the Future of DTC Sports Streaming Apps
How critical to the future of the live sports streaming experience is multiview, now touted as a key feature in a growing number of DTC apps? Do viewers really want to tech-direct the games they watch or follow multiple games at once? Is it most valuable to gamblers? Ateme’s Francois Guilleautot, Major League Table Tennis’s David Guinan, Roku’s Joe Franzetta, and Ring Digital’s Brian Ring speculate on the many possible futures of multiview streaming in this clip from Streaming Media 2025.
Multiview Sports as UX Differentiator
Ring invites Guilleautot to have the first word on the topic, referencing Ateme’s multiview and sports stream personalization capabilities and the multiview insurgency in the DTC sports streaming mainstream. “One of the things that you guys do really well is the multi-view feature," he says. "You've got Fox One now pitching DTC, you've got ESPN pitching DTC. How important is multiview to the future of those apps?”
"There is such a proliferation of content," Guilleautot replies. "It's everywhere and I think customers are now looking for a differentiator more than ever. People need a more engaging experience and I think everyone's expectations of what a good experience is have changed, especially younger audiences. They want something that is personalized, that is tailored. But also there needs to be a why factor. There needs to be something different that will drag the customer to watch those specific channels. And I think multiview is something that is gaining popularity."
Multiview of course means different things to different viewers and in different apps, of course, whether it means splitting screen real estate between different live games or switching between multiple angles on the same game. "With picture-in-picture you're built to do a lot of cool things and it allows you to basically select what you want to watch. And I think this is something that brings a lot of value and is a key differentiator. It grabs more viewers and reduces churn and it's really invaluable in this time where there's an ocean of content and no one knows what to watch. "
Extolling the virtues of multiangle viewing of a single game, Guilleautot goes on to say, "If you know my favorite sport, I can watch that angle that I want where I can see my team and I have a dedicated commentary. So if you have an NFL game or a hockey game and you have your commentary from your team and you can watch it with the main feed, those kinds of things can be very strong differentiators. And I think that's where Ateme comes in. We have a strong history of really trying to push the boundaries of what the good customer experience is. Historically, we were the first to bring low-latency streaming to wide audiences with Canal+ in France more than 10 years ago. And then more recently, last year we experimented with immersive and then we were one of the Day One partners for AR with the Apple Vision Pro. So we just keep pushing the boundaries and making sure that we enable good customer end user experiences in streaming."
Leaning Back in the (Tech) Director's Chair
While describing himself as a “big fan” of Ateme products, Guinan takes exception to Guilleautot’s assertion that the opportunity to switch angles and audio tracks in real time is likely to enhance the viewing experience for a broad swath of sports fans, David Guinan “Let's be frank [about] multi-screen viewing," he says. "I don't think anybody wants to be a technical director. However, for betting, and it's incredible. If you're a degenerate gambler," Guinan quips, "being able to have your fantasy lineup automatically selected—what a company called Maestro is doing that's powering ESPN—where you can actually feed it your season-long fantasy [team] and it will choose the actual images and video streams based on what you're watching, but also who's in your lineup. That's incredible, and especially with low latency, you're onto something."
“Exactly," Guilleautot agrees. If you can deliver "low latency, then someone will find a way to make a buck."
Multiple Angles on Multiview
Franzetta concurs that multiview is indeed a topic that demands to be examined from multiple angles, given the range of potential applications and the complexity inherent in implementing them. “
"Multi-view has a lot of different aspects to it," he says. "You can have multiple views from one event. You can have multiple events from within one app, or you can have multiple events that are in different apps. Trying to put all of those different pieces together and do it client side whether on a device or on an operating system or whatever it might be, you're letting people choose as opposed to compositing on the server side and sending it down. There are a lot of different complexities there and a lot of different use cases. And I think some of them have more rights issues than others."
Ultimately, the challenge of delivering any UX enhancement that gives users more control and more options for how they experience a game is to make sure "streaming is as easy [for the user] as linear. You're sitting there on Saturday afternoon watching college football in a linear environment and you can switch back and forth pretty easily. Streaming can be challenging. So that's one of the things that we think about and we're trying to address [at Roku]. And then the other piece of it is just trying to go beyond what the linear environment could provide and add interactive features, personalization, other revenue streams, and opportunities that are layered onto the experience that go beyond what linear can do. How do you meet the expectations that people have in linear and then how do you exceed them in streaming?"
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