TiviMate Multiview: Watch Several Channels

Multiview is the feature people buy TiviMate Premium for on busy sports afternoons: two, four or more channels side by side, and one press to move the sound from one to another. It works well when three things line up — the app, the device and the subscription — and fails in predictable ways when one of them falls short. TiviMate is a third-party player by Armobsoft FZE.

What You Need

• TiviMate Premium. See the TiviMate Premium guide for how it is bought and activated.
• A subscription with enough connections. One per panel. Four channels on screen means four connections in use.
• Bandwidth for all of them. Allow roughly 10 Mbps per HD channel as a working figure, on top of whatever else the household is doing.
• A device that can decode several videos at once. Dedicated boxes cope better than budget sticks.

How to Start Multiview

1. Play any channel.
2. Press the select button to bring up the playback panel, and choose the multiview icon — a small grid.
3. Pick a layout: two side by side, a two-by-two grid, or a larger arrangement.
4. Select an empty panel and choose a channel for it from your groups or favourites.
5. Repeat for the remaining panels.

Use the direction buttons to move the highlight between panels. The highlighted panel is the one you hear. Selecting a panel offers options to change its channel, make it full screen, or remove it. The back button leaves multiview and returns to normal viewing. The exact icons and wording vary slightly between app versions.

Connections: The Part That Catches People Out

An IPTV subscription is sold with a number of simultaneous connections. Providers count streams, not devices or apps. Two panels in multiview on one television use two connections, exactly as two televisions in different rooms would. On a one-connection plan, the second panel either fails with an error or knocks the first one off.

The guide to simultaneous IPTV connections explains how limits are enforced, and our plans page shows the options with more than one connection.

Getting Smooth Playback

• Use Ethernet. Several streams at once expose a marginal Wi-Fi link quickly.
• Prefer HD versions over 4K in panels. A quarter of the screen cannot show 4K detail, and the lower bitrate leaves room for the other channels.
• Start with two. Add panels one at a time and stop when playback begins to stutter. That is your device’s practical ceiling.
• Keep the hardware decoder on. Software decoding of several streams overwhelms most streaming sticks.
• Close other apps first. Memory is the tightest resource on small devices.

When Multiview Misbehaves

• The second panel shows an error number. Usually the connection limit. See TiviMate error codes.
• All panels stutter together. Bandwidth or device power. Reduce the number of panels, then check the buffering fix.
• One panel is black with sound. That stream’s format is not decoding; replace it with another version of the channel.
• The multiview icon is locked. Premium is not active on this device. Sign in to your TiviMate account from the app’s settings.

Good Uses for It

Multiview earns its keep when several live events overlap: simultaneous kick-offs on an NFL Sunday, a game on one panel and a news channel on another, or keeping an eye on a second match while the main one is at a break. For finding which channels carry which games, see how to watch NFL live.