Unlocking the Power of Multiview Playback – The Future of Immersive Streaming

For streaming platforms, the need to offer more dynamic, interactive, and immersive viewing experiences to set themselves apart from the competition always continues. Sports fans always crave control over how they watch their favorite games and content and seek better options to meet their viewing habits. To give them a new experience and help them keep their eyes on every play or every camera angle, the next innovation being talked about more now is multiview experiences. This latest Player feature promises to give viewers a new way to get all of the live and on-demand content they want at their fingertips, especially in sports.

What is Multiview?

At its core, Multiview lets users view multiple video streams simultaneously on a single screen. This feature can be deployed in three ways:

1. Viewing different streams simultaneously: This allows users to stream multiple sports events at the same time, ensuring they catch every critical moment across each event without missing a beat.
2. Viewing the same scene from different angles: Consider the excitement of viewers watching two drivers in their favorite racing series chase each other down the track, with the ability to switch between different camera angles or even driver perspectives in real-time.
3. Viewing ads alongside the main event: Expanding monetization opportunities by allowing ads to be shown dynamically alongside event coverage. Ads can be shown during play and during scheduled ad breaks. Ads can also be tailored to the content, for example, to match the brands & sponsors visible in the coverage at any given time.

These use cases enhance the viewing experience and empower users and platforms to curate how they engage with content. Whether sports enthusiasts want to follow multiple games or viewers look to experience events from various perspectives, Multiview brings a new level of interactivity.

The Benefits of Multiview

The Multiview feature unlocks a lot of possibilities for both viewers and streaming platforms:

• Enhanced engagement and boosting subscribers: Multiview keeps audiences more engaged and allows platforms to provide premium offerings by enabling viewers to watch multiple streams simultaneously. Whether following different angles of a live event or tracking several matches simultaneously, this feature ensures that viewers are more involved and less likely to churn.
• New Revenue Streams: For businesses, Multiview can be a compelling addition to premium subscription tiers. It offers a unique value proposition that can drive subscriptions and, potentially, ad monetization, as more screens mean more opportunities for ad placements. Additionally, through the Bitmovin Advertising Module (BAM), platforms can utilize different ad placements such as L-bar and picture-in-picture, enabling users to continue watching while increasing their ad revenue.

Example of how Multiview ad playback would look with a video and a video on one screen.

• A social viewing experience: Multiview also fosters a more social viewing experience. This enables businesses and groups of friends to stream different parts of a game or event together on a single screen—each with their preferred angle or game, but all are still part of the same shared experience.

The Challenge of Multiview on Different Platforms

However, delivering Multiview functionality has its challenges. For higher-powered devices, deploying a small number of video players simultaneously may be possible. However, reliably streaming with more than 2-4 streams simultaneously and on devices such as most TVs, which typically have only one video decoder, presents a significant hurdle. These devices can generally only display one active video stream at a time, making using multiple players to stream different videos simultaneously unfeasible.

The solution lies in the concept of “tiled” streams. A tiled stream is a single video feed composed of multiple smaller “tiles,” each representing a separate stream. This method allows for multiple videos to be viewed simultaneously, even on devices with technical limitations, by encoding all desired streams into a single composite feed, which can be done on the server-side or client-side.

Typically, we’ve seen this done on the client-side by other offerings on the market, making their players heavy, overly complex and causing problems on low-power devices such as delayed startup time or buffering. This all limits the feature set available and the speed of supporting new devices in future.

How Bitmovin is enabling customers through the Multiview Player feature

Multiview is the latest Player feature we’ve seen a growing interest in from the streaming platforms we support. Here’s how it works:

• Tiled stream creation: Our integration with the Bitmovin Live Encoder allows for seamless tiled stream encoding within our solutions. This process creates a mosaic of multiple video streams combined into one, and all are handled server-side for optimal performance and efficiency.
  • Where Bitmovin innovates: For Bitmovin, this piece is done server-side, ensuring the Bitmovin Player stays lightweight and keeps playback on all devices as stress-free as possible.
    

Example of how Multiview playback looks with 4 streams side-by-side on the Bitmovin Player.

Example of how Multiview playback looks with 4 streams – one main one and 3 by its side on the Bitmovin Player.

• Secure and seamless user experience: The Bitmovin Player, integrated with every major DRM for superior content security, enables playback of this tiled stream, allowing users to select any tile of interest. When a tile is selected, the Player seamlessly switches to the high-resolution version of that stream, continuing playback without interruptions.
  
• More revenue-generating possibilities: With Bitmovin’s Advertising Module, platforms can implement a wide variety of ad formats alongside the event stream, enabling them to provide a better user experience and generate more revenue. This includes new ad experiences like picture-in-picture, L-bar, and side-by-side. These layouts increase the number of potential ad spots and allow ads to be matched with the event coverage, for example, showing brands that are visible in the stadium or from celebrity endorsers who are attending the game.
  
• More devices supported: Bitmovin’s Player supports the broadest range of devices on the market, meaning platforms can deploy this feature on every device they are streaming on. This approach ensures a smooth and intuitive user experience and maximizes compatibility across various devices, from high-end smart TVs to everyday mobile phones.

The Road Ahead

While Multiview’s potential is already immense, there are also possibilities to optimize it further, such as reducing the complexity of customizing tiled streams. We are actively exploring ways to optimize this process, possibly by reusing existing streams to avoid the need for additional encoding. 

New standards are emerging, like SGAI, which brings new possibilities for signaling ad placement in multiview. Multiview video players can use SGAI information within the stream to show ads in the best possible locations to maximize monetization potential, beyond simple ad breaks.

The future of Multiview is bright, particularly in live sports streaming—a key market for Bitmovin. As major platforms like YouTube TV roll out their own Multiview capabilities, it’s clear that this feature is set to become a standard expectation among viewers.

Why Multiview Matters

For Bitmovin and our clients, Multiview is more than just a technological advancement, it’s a strategic necessity. As the streaming landscape becomes increasingly competitive, the ability to offer unique, engaging experiences like Multiview will be critical in retaining viewers and attracting new ones. For sports broadcasters and streaming services, particularly, Multiview offers a way to stand out in a crowded market, providing fans with the immersive, customizable experiences they crave.

At Bitmovin, we’re not just responding to industry trends but shaping them. By continuing to innovate and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in streaming technology, we’re ensuring our customers can deliver the next generation of viewing experiences.

Want to check it out?

Want to see Multiview in action? It is a standard offering with the Bitmovin Player and will be deployed soon. Still, while it’s not available for general use, we’re excited to offer demos and discuss how this feature can benefit your streaming service. Contact us today to learn more.