FINALLY: YouTube TV Is Adding The Ability To Watch Four Channels At Once, Just In Time For Football Season

The Verge — YouTube TV, Google’s take on cable TV, could soon let viewers watch up to four live streams simultaneously in a new feature called “Mosaic Mode” reports Protocol. That’s according to a non-public presentation Google gave to its smart TV hardware partners, in which the search giant also discussed optimizations coming for YouTube Shorts on the big screen, as well as new YouTube Music functionality. 

Mosaic Mode brings to mind a similar feature that was available with Sony’s now-defunct PlayStation Vue service. Although it was announced in a presentation for Google TV and Android TV hardware manufacturers, Protocol notes that the feature is likely to eventually arrive on non-Android smart TVs from Samsung and LG given that Google likes to keep its services consistent across different hardware.

With all the insane technology we have in 2022, it's remarkable how backwards we've gone with picture-in-picture. I've often wondered if I made up watching multiple things at once on my grandparents' television more than a decade ago. But finally, YouTube TV is bringing back the feature that should have never left our homes, hopefully just in time for football.

There's nothing worse than having two or three great college football games going on at the same time on a Saturday and flipping back and forth, inevitably missing a big play in one of them. It's ridiculous it took this long to bring back some thing which seems — to someone with no actual knowledge of how any of this works — fairly easy to implement, given it existed 15 years ago.

But all's well that ends well. Hopefully Mosaic Mode is rolled out soon and we can enjoy four football games on one screen in Week 1.