Something is seriously wrong with YouTube TV multiview, users say

YouTube TV’s multiview feature is one of my favorite things about the streaming service, especially right now during football season when I can have four games playing simultaneously on any given Sunday. Unfortunately, multiview hasn’t been working very well for a lot of YouTube TV subscribers.

For the last couple of weeks, the r/YouTubeTV subreddit has been flooded with user complaints about multiview being hampered by extremely low picture quality, including comments about multiview streams appearing blocky and “sometimes unviewable.”

There are at least five separate threads on r/YouTubeTV posted within the last two to three weeks, all reporting bad multiview picture quality, and even more comments on those threads confirming the same issue. As one person writes, “Been with YT NFL sunday ticket since the beginning. This is the worst multiview quality. It’s terrible today. My top two screens are decent but my bottom two are near unwatchable.”

The biggest culprit for low-quality video streams is almost always your internet connection. Especially when watching up to four channels at once with multiview, you’re demanding a lot from your home network. It would be easy to assume that low-quality streams are simply a result of people not having fast enough internet, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

One person notes that they have fiber internet and “no issues with other streaming apps.” Despite this, “at least 1 or 2 of the 4 NFL games in multiview look like they’re in 144p.” Someone else commented that they have gigabit internet with Xfinity, and even so, their multiview quality is “considerably lower than last year.”

The official TeamYouTube account has replied to at least two threads, though the company’s responses are about as generic as you’d expect. In one instance, TeamYouTube recommends restarting your streaming device and checking for software updates, while another comment from the company suggests contacting customer support.

On the one hand, I can understand not reading too much into all of this. It’s possible (and likely) that some of these reports really do boil down to a poor internet connection, old streaming hardware, or something else. For what it’s worth, I’ve been using multiview on YouTube TV without any issues, as has another colleague at Android Authority.

That being said, the sheer volume of complaints suggests that there may indeed be a problem on Google’s end. And if that ends up being true, we can only hope that whatever is wrong gets fixed sooner rather than later. For a service that costs $83/month — and especially for people who also paid hundreds more for Sunday Ticket — this isn’t the kind of thing you want to see.