Four live games on one screen sounds brilliant right up to the point where you divide a 55 inch panel by four. Each quarter is a window about 27 inches on the diagonal, and that is before you account for broadcast graphics that were laid out to be legible at full size. Anyone who has messed about with picture-in-picture for two matches already knows roughly how this goes.
The detail I have not seen spelled out anywhere is what happens to the video itself. Four simultaneous feeds have to come from somewhere, and every honest option is a compromise: drop each one in resolution, drop the frame rate, or composite a single stream server side and let the box decode one thing. Which route they took decides whether this is genuinely useful or a feature you show off on opening weekend and never touch again. None of the coverage I read went near the question, which is a shame, because it is the only one that matters.
Audio is the other half of it. Four commentary tracks is not a thing, so three of them are muted by default, which quietly reframes the whole feature as glancing at scores rather than actually watching four matches.
None of that makes it a bad idea. Sports multiview is one of the few things a big panel does that a phone genuinely cannot. But I want to see it running on a real living room set before I get excited, not in a press shot where every feed is a wide pitch view.
If you already have this, what does it actually look like with all four up?
The detail I have not seen spelled out anywhere is what happens to the video itself. Four simultaneous feeds have to come from somewhere, and every honest option is a compromise: drop each one in resolution, drop the frame rate, or composite a single stream server side and let the box decode one thing. Which route they took decides whether this is genuinely useful or a feature you show off on opening weekend and never touch again. None of the coverage I read went near the question, which is a shame, because it is the only one that matters.
Audio is the other half of it. Four commentary tracks is not a thing, so three of them are muted by default, which quietly reframes the whole feature as glancing at scores rather than actually watching four matches.
None of that makes it a bad idea. Sports multiview is one of the few things a big panel does that a phone genuinely cannot. But I want to see it running on a real living room set before I get excited, not in a press shot where every feed is a wide pitch view.
If you already have this, what does it actually look like with all four up?
