By Jason Snell

April 2, 2024 8:38 AM PT

MLB tvOS app adds Multiview, and it’s a winner

Last week I provided a lot of tough love to Major League Baseball’s apps on Apple’s platforms. The MLB visionOS app is really buggy and lacks some key features. Meanwhile, an update to the MLB iPad App broke it on the Mac for most users. (Apparently it works until you’re logged in, at which point it starts crashing?)

There’s no news on either front—hopefully updates are coming, and it’s a long season—but I did want to share a bit more positivity about MLB’s tech abilities on another platform: Apple TV. This year’s MLB tvOS app adds support for Multiview, allowing you to place up to four games on screen at one time. And it’s an extremely good implementation.

To enable Multiview, bring up the player controls in any given game. You’ll see options to enter Gameday (which is excellent if you’re a pitch-by-pitch baseball nerd) or picture-in-picture, but there’s a new option to enable Multiview. When you select this, the video slides back and brings up an interface that lets you add more live games via cards at the bottom of the screen:

MLB’s interface here is top notch. When I was telling my wife about this feature, she complained that our Fubo TV Multiview feature is too complicated. And she’s right—it requires a bunch of remote-control gestures that are a bit opaque. MLB, in contrast, displays very clear instructions about which buttons do what:

The instructive text is clear and bold, and it changes based on context. My only complaint about the new interface is the lack of layout options. You can only display one game in large format; the others go in a strip on the right side of the screen, whether there’s one, two, or three. The Multiview feature in the Fubo and TV apps allow you to place two games side by side at the same size, and four games tiled perfectly to fill up the entire screen. (That’s my preferred layout.)

There are some other quirks: When you zoom into a single game and then zoom back out later, the other games sometimes don’t start playing, or play from the point where you left rather than just showing what’s happening live.

But quirks aside, I’m really impressed. In fact, this implementation is so good that I found myself assuming it would have limitations that it doesn’t actually have. Since Gameday appears in the same playback controls as Multiview, I assumed they were mutually exclusive, but they’re not: If you zoom into a single game, you can enter Gameday mode. When you click the back button, Gameday disappears. Click the back button another time, and the video zooms back into the Multiview window. It’s all smooth—this shows off the power that Apple packs inside modern Apple TV hardware, which is far beyond what’s available in other streaming boxes.

So, gold stars to the developers of the MLB app for Apple TV. The addition of Multiview is a winner, even though it’s got some quirks that need to be ironed out, and I’d really like some alternative layout options.

If you want to see it in action, here’s a video demo.

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