How to watch several sports matches at the same time

The problem is always the same weekend: four matches, one screen, and the goals happen in the three you are not watching. Here is what is actually available.

First, check whether your provider has multiview

Some broadcasters build it in, and if yours does it is the best option because the streams are properly licensed and synchronised.

• Sky Sports, DAZN, ESPN+ and a few national broadcasters offer a multiview or mosaic mode, usually on their own app, usually two to four streams.
• YouTube TV has a multiview feature for selected events only — you cannot choose arbitrary channels.
• F1 TV Pro is the strongest of the lot, with onboard cameras and timing as separate panes.

The catch is that every one of them only shows their own channels. The moment one of your four matches is on a different service, official multiview stops being a solution.

Tiled windows: works, wears thin fast

Open each stream in its own browser window and snap them into quarters. Win + arrow on Windows, or Rectangle on macOS.

Two problems show up within about ten minutes. First, each window carries a title bar, tab strip and address bar, so four windows eat a large slice of a 1080p screen. Second, sound: all four are playing at once, and muting and unmuting means clicking into each window in turn, which brings it to the front and covers the others.

Fine for two games. Not fine for four.

A browser extension that mirrors the tabs

An extension can take what each tab is already showing and draw them together in a grid. Because it works from the tab rather than from an embed, it does not care which service the stream is on — your league's own player, a club stream, YouTube, Twitch and a broadcaster's web player can all sit on the same wall.

Video Mosaic does this:

1. Open each match in its own tab, play it for a second, pause it.
2. Right-click each page and choose Add this tab to Video Mosaic.
3. Press Play all.

The sound problem, solved

This is the part that matters more than the layout. Four commentaries at once is unwatchable, and muting three of them by hand is worse.

Set sound to follow the mouse. The audio plays from whichever screen your pointer is over, and switching game is a flick of the wrist — no clicking, no window coming to the front, no losing your place. When something kicks off in the corner, move the mouse there and you are listening to it.

If you prefer a fixed choice, pin the sound to one screen and leave it.

Catching the goal you missed

Every screen has its own timeline with −10s and +10s. Miss a goal in the bottom-left while watching the top-right? Rewind that one screen. The other three keep running live. This is the single biggest advantage over tiled windows, where rewinding means finding the right window, clicking into it, and losing the others behind it.

Practical setup

• Second monitor, fullscreen. Push the wall to the secondary display and go fullscreen. The browser chrome disappears and you get the whole panel.
• Drop the quality per stream. Four 1080p streams is a lot of decoding. Setting each tab to 720p costs you almost nothing at quarter-screen size and keeps the frame rate solid.
• Columns by count. Two games side by side; four in a 2×2; five or six in three columns with the match you care about most in the top-left, which is where your eye goes first.

What will not work

DRM-protected services — the ones that ship their video with Widevine protection — show a black screen, because Chrome refuses to hand that picture to any extension. In practice: catch-up apps from the big streamers are out, while most live sports web players, club streams, YouTube and Twitch are fine. Test with one match before you build a wall around it.