44% of Sports Fans Follow a Second Game on Their Phones. Here Are the Best Multiview Options.

Second screens are very prevalent among sports fans

Sometimes, watching sports is an inconvenience.

Games airing at the same time. Games going into overtime or extra innings bleeding into the next scheduled window. Games in other sports airing on a completely different streaming service. It’s enough to turn sports fans into TV MacGyvers just to enjoy as many matchups as possible.

Previously unpublished data from a recent CableTV.com survey found that about 44% of sports fans surveyed follow a second game on their phones while another plays on TV. That’s quite a remarkable amount of second-screening.

“We’ve known for a while that the second screen is really the driver of getting people to consume and engage in a positive way,” says Norm O’Reilly, a sports management expert, partner at T1 Agency, and professor and director of The Sponsorship Lab at the University of Florida.

The data suggests that sports fans are solving for something that perhaps current technology hasn’t quite figured out yet.

Sports fans using a second screen is an evolving trend

Experts who spoke to CableTV.com say sports fans watching games on multiple screens is not a new phenomenon. Picture-in-picture technology emerged in the mid-1970s during the Olympics and gave people an early way to watch two live events on the same screen.

But smartphones have made it easier than ever to follow sports, despite the dizzying amount of overlapping game options. Entertainment lawyer Marc Hershberg says he often follows a Dodgers game on his phone while watching something else on TV.

“What is changing is the scale and ease with which audiences can [follow a second game],” Hershberg says. “Fans have more live programming available to them than they can possibly watch on a single screen, and technology is giving them more ways to navigate that abundance. In that sense, the second screen is less a solution to a problem with sports viewing than a response to the scarcity of viewers’ time and attention.”

Why sports fans keep reaching for a second screen

Psychotherapist Tyler J. Jensen says second-screening has evolved, in part, due to shorter attention spans working in tandem with social media consumption, the rise of sports betting, and fantasy leagues.

“Culturally, I have observed that as more and more individuals metabolize popular social media formats and ingrain those habits within their sports watching, individuals are consciously or unconsciously trying to recreate those same environments where they are most convenient to them,” Jensen says.

Independent tennis journalist Amy Lundy Dahl recently weighed in on X in the wake of Carlos Alcaraz and Ben Shelton finishing their epic U.S. Open quarterfinal bout at 3:33 a.m. local time in New York City. In response to calls to shorten men’s Grand Slam matches to best-of-three, she argued that people should embrace the fact that viewers “dip in and out” of live sporting events.

“Most people watch sports with multiple screens,” Dahl wrote. “For example: Saturday night I had different US Open matches on two screens, college football on a big screen, and a phone in my hand. This is the new normal.”

The numbers, anecdotal evidence, and expert analysis bear it out: second-screening sports broadcasts is not only here to stay, but will become more and more prevalent in years to come.

“The fan is creating their own command center,” sports marketing expert Andy Abramson says. “They’re doing this because sports junkies always need a fix, and the phone has become the needle.”

YouTube TV and DIRECTV have the most robust multiview experiences on the market

The options for TV plans and their corresponding apps can feel endless. But in our experience, two services stand out, specifically for their multiview features.

The first is YouTube TV, which boasts a fully customizable multiview. If you’re watching a channel, you can navigate to the Multiview tab, click “Add to multiview,” then click “Build a multiview.” You can watch up to four games at once.

Then there’s DIRECTV. The service recently introduced its more-than-serviceable Curated Multiview specifically tailored to sports. It’s not as customizable as YouTube TV, but the feature is easy to find when searching for live sports on any given night.

Plenty of other services have multiview, but they have their flaws.

Apple TV‘s is only for select sports broadcasts — including MLB and MLS — and you need an Apple TV 4K device to access it. But if that’s your setup, we like the full customization and the ability to easily change the size of the tiles. The service itself doesn’t offer many live sports, but its multiview is quite sophisticated.

ESPN Unlimited has mountains of sports content basically 24/7. But its multiviews are preset, which can be frustrating.

FOX One, Paramount+, and Peacock have also made strides with their own multiview experiences.

Is multiview lagging behind?

Experts tell CableTV.com that the multiview experience may not be meeting consumer needs yet.

“Multiview usually sits behind newer hardware, a higher tier, or three taps inside an app that was designed for browsing,” Chris Coussons, founder of London-based Visionary Marketing, says. “A phone propped against the remote does the same job in four seconds, with no upgrade and no extra line on the bill.”

Abramson describes CableTV.com’s findings as “proof that multiview is still too limited in what’s being delivered.”

“Fans do not just want four boxes chosen by a provider; they want their needs met,” Abramson says. “They want their games, bets, markets, alerts, social graph, and fantasy implications presented in a single, fluid environment.”

Reddit user thearmadillo lamented their experience with YouTube TV’s multiview for football after initially feeling excited about the feature.

“You end up just watching a single game on a smaller quarter of a TV with a bunch of distracting stuff around it,” the user wrote. “You can’t make out the players. You can’t enjoy any of the impressive stuff, as there’s just too much going on on the screen to really appreciate what is happening.”

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