For the Premier League 2025/26 season Sky Sports has launched Multiview, a new programme that is available across all Sky TV platforms, Now and the Sky Sports app.
For match weeks following midweek European action, when up to four matches may be played simultaneously due to fixture displacement, Super Sundays on Sky Sports are being supersized and viewers can keep up by using Multiview.
Viewers wanting to keep an eye on all the live action can do so as Multiview will feature every live match. It is a dynamic format that moves from ground to ground covering all the goals and big moments, complete with dedicated commentary and half time analysis. It sits alongside all games available to watch individually.
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The main game is shown in a larger central window, with three smaller windows displaying other games. The feature switches focus to big moments, and users also have the option to watch each game separately. The Multiview feature shifts the main screen and commentary to whichever game has a significant event occurring.
Super cool
Kevin McCue, Sky Sports’ director of studios and technology, is as excited about Multiview as he is about Sky Sports’ IP transformation. He explains why: “It’s super cool! We have all these very complex, massive logistical things that we do and build, like big IP galleries and all of the other achievements, and I get excited about Multiview as well.”
McCue comments on the work that has gone on at Sky Studios regarding the development of Multiview. “With Multiview we set ourselves an ambition of not having to tie up one of our already heavily contended production control rooms to achieve it, and also we wanted the ability for the systems we have to scale if we needed it to, to change from different football genres if it needed to, and also be quite dynamic and have the ability to develop over time.
“So what you actually see in the Multiview is a very complex build on Grass Valley’s AMPP product coupled with a very complex integration with an HTML5 graphics provider,” McCue continues. “When you see Multiview go out for the first time, you’ll see how it’s dynamically working. It is very clever about the way it ‘heroes’ matches and it puts matches back into their respective position, from small box to big box. It’s clever around the way that we can roll in replays, so we have an EVS replay op as part of that group that are producing Multiview.”
Multiview has been created to be almost vendor independent, McCue says. “The way we’ve built it is that from a technical standpoint, we’ve abstracted all of the control of Multiview away from a vendor as such, and built the whole of the operational interface using Ross Dashboard, a control service set of tools.
“What that does is it means that a small number of people can deliver Multiview, and that’s editorial as well as technical. We can do a very complex production doing quite complex things, but all of that is built through a layer of automation, a layer of abstracted control, and it’s all built on Grass Valley’s AMPP platform, and that’s all built on-prem in 2110.
“We’re actually describing that as ‘compute on-prem’ as opposed to using cloud or any of the other technologies for that. We’ve actually found that for Multiview, this is almost the sweet spot of how this needs to work. It does lots of substitutions and it does all kinds of other jiggery pokery in the 2110 space to make it work, but actually from a user perspective, it’s very, very simple,” says McCue.
Almost perfect
Developing Multiview took the Sky Sports team a year to develop the concept into ramping up to building the core of the technology platform to deliver the service.
Adds McCue on the development of Multiview: “We have quite a relatively small development team of SMEs that will deliver the over and above functionality of the things that we do. We have core teams that are going to deliver the weight of what we do in terms of the production control facilities and whether it’s operational or technical. But the specialist teams have been working on Multiview in the background over the course of the year, and that’s just ramped up as we’ve gone through to launch.
“It’s very much around building something, testing it, showing that to the likes of Phil [Marshall] and Steve Smith [executive director, content, Sky Sports] and others within the sports senior leadership team, taking notes on what we’ve built, and then going and refining it again. When you are building in software as opposed to hardware, you can just keep going back again and refining and trimming and shaping. What we’ve got now is something that’s just incredibly, almost perfect for the job.”
To end supersized Super Sundays, a new analysis and reaction show ‘Extra Time’ is seeing host Jamie Carragher dive deeper into the key moments from all the day’s games. Broadcast on the biggest Sundays of the season with four or more Premier League matches, the hour-long programme starts at 19.30, following the flagship 16.30 fixture.
