ESPN unveils new Apple TV app with multi-screen experience

Just in time for college football season and the U.S. Open, ESPN has relaunched its Apple TV app. For those who have the latest generation of Apple TV, ESPN will allow viewers to watch four different streams at once.

This follows Fox Sports Go and MLB At Bat which also allows Apple TV viewers to watch multiple streams at once. In fact, viewers can also see four different streams on one screen on Fox Sports Go.

There are five ways to see multiple streams on the ESPN app, a double box, picture-in-picture, three or four screens screens with the left being the main stream and the right side with smaller boxes and then a four-way grid. And you can change the order of your streams using your remote.

ESPN has issued this video demonstrating how to bring four different streams to your TV.

So as long as you have a cable or satellite log-in and have the 4th generation of Apple TV, you’ll be able to split your screen as many as four ways. ESPN is calling this “tvOS Multicast” and it comes just in time for college football season when the networks of ESPN will be airing and streaming multiple games throughout the day. ESPN says it airs and streams as many as 55 college football games on a given Saturday in the fall.

Let’s say there’s a Big Ten game airing on ESPN2 opposite a SEC game on ESPN along with an ACC game on ESPNU as well as other games on ESPN3, you can access them and put them on all at once.

It certainly enhances the Apple TV app and no longer do users have switch between streams if they want to see two or three games. Will this feature be available to the ESPN over the top standable product when it launches next year? You would have to believe so, but first things first.

We’ll see if this will be offered to other desktop devices like Roku, Chromecast, Amazon Fire and others. This is a big step to improve Apple TV’s ESPN app. Now we’ll see how others will be affected down the line.

[Recode]