Streaming service Fubo is rolling out its popular multiview feature on higher-end Roku models, including the Roku Ultra, with plans to launch the feature on other Roku devices in the coming weeks.
The feature allows Fubo subscribers to create a custom grid of up to four live channels, which they can watch simultaneously on a single screen.
“Multiview has been one of our most loved features and we’re thrilled to expand it to Roku users,” Isaac Josephson, the Senior Vice President of Product Management at Fubo, said in a statement. “With multiview and a suite of product features that enable content discovery and personalization, Fubo’s goal is to ensure fans never miss a moment of their favorite content.”
Multiview has been available to Fubo subscribers who watch content through Apple TV, with the feature largely limited to those devices because the internal hardware was capable of pulling in four simultaneous streams at once.
Roku devices are considerably cheaper than Apple TV — the fully-loaded Roku Ultra retails for around $100, compared to the top model of Apple TV, which costs $150. Some Roku TV streamers can be found at retail stores for as little as $18 during key shopping events like Black Friday.
The low price point is largely attributed to Roku’s use of low-power components, which were thought to be incompatible with Fubo’s multiview feature. That has apparently been resolved, with Fubo affirming the multiview feature will eventually debut on other Roku devices in the future.
In a press release on Thursday, Fubo said it pioneered multiview back in 2020, “years ahead of other vMVPDs,” or virtual multi-video programming distributors, the term usually applied to cable-like streaming services.
The company also said its multiview perk is truly customizable “and available for all Fubo channels, unlike some multiviewing features on other streaming platforms.”
Both points were apparently shots at YouTube TV, which began testing its multiview feature for news and sports last year. The company rolled out the feature more-broadly for subscribers of its NFL Sunday Ticket package last year, though the multiview perk offered a curated selection of pre-determined games — meaning football fans couldn’t customize a curated window of games they chose on their own.
This year, YouTube said it was evolving its multiview feature by allowing NFL Sunday Ticket fans to choose the precise out-of-market games they want to watch — though the feature simply expanded the number of pre-determined games that were offered by ensuring all NFL Sunday Ticket games had multiple options. The feature still doesn’t allow NFL Sunday Ticket subscribers to build their own multiview screens with in-market and out-of-market games, plus NFL RedZone, if they pay for that.
The YouTube TV multiview feature also doesn’t allow customers to mix channels from different genres — three pre-built multiview features exist for news (consisting of CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and BBC World News), business (CNBC and Fox Business Network) and weather (The Weather Channel and Fox News), but subscribers can’t modify those multiview windows to add or remove channels like ABC News Live, NewsNation or Scripps News.
That said, YouTube TV still has an edge on Fubo TV in some respect: While Fubo’s multiview is limited to Apple TV and some high-end Roku devices, YouTube TV’s multiview feature works on all of its apps, including those for Amazon Fire TV, Android TV (Google TV) and Android and Apple phones and tablets.
