Apple has been trying to woo baseball and soccer fans by offering free MLB and MLS games on Apple TV 4K. And now Apple TV lets you watch four games at once, giving you more control than YouTube TV.

This is part of the tvOS 16.5 update, which introduces a multi-view sports feature that lets you stream four live games simultaneously. The only downside: Multi-View Sports on Apple TV only works with MLB Friday Night Baseball and MLS Season Pass games.

To control which games you watch, you must select the grid icon that appears above the timeline bar and select the "Other Games" option. In the grid view, you can select which match volume is playing, and Apple says the audio options include home radio broadcasts for MLS Season Pass subscribers.

Speaking of which, Apple is offering a one-month free trial of MLS Season Pass to celebrate the launch of Multiview.

Almost all major streaming services have attempted to attract live sports enthusiasts to varying degrees; YouTube TV recently added Multiview, but it is only offered for pre-selected groups of games, so you can't pick and choose what you watch . By the fall, this will be improved for NFL live streams (remember, YouTube TV is the new home of NFL Sunday Ticket).

Amazon signed a $1 billion per season deal to stream Thursday Night Football games in 2021, and Apple won the rights to Friday Night Football in 2022 for a paltry $85 million per year for the next seven years.

Clearly, both services are hoping to cash in on the lucrative advertising revenue and viewership that live sports provides.

Unfortunately, Apple only allows access to the multi-view sports mode to two first-party sports apps. There are many other third-party apps on the platform that would be great with the same view.

However, who knows what the future holds for Apple's tvOS platform. This is just a test, and apps like Netflix and Sling TV may be added in the future with tvOS 17.

As for when tvOS 17 will appear, we suspect it will appear next month at WWDC 2023 along with new versions of iPadOS, iOS, and MacOS, as it has done almost every year for the past decade.