"Picture-in-Picture" technology has been around since the 1976 Montreal Summer Olympic Games, when Quantel introduced a new technology that let broadcasters put two live video feeds on TV screens at the same time.
Later, TV manufacturers began making impossibly clunky 32-inch "big-screen" CRT-based sets that included multiple broadcast tuners allowing users to simultaneously monitor two -- sometimes three -- channels simultaneously.
In the IP age, we're no longer restricted by the number of tuners we have -- we experience an iteration of "PiP" tech involving as many as nine simultaneous video images on a screen every time we interact with multiple colleagues a Zoom call.
With the countdown already under way for college basketball's "March Madness" tournament -- always a showcase event for any new PiP application -- software maker Mozilla has included a useful PiP feature in its latest version of its Firefox operating system.
As the YouTube tutorial shows below, Firefox users are able to tile together as many live video windows as they can simultaneously fit on their desktop screen.
In preparation for our own first-round NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament plan, with games overlapping in mass as 64 teams face off in a 48-hour period from March 17-18, Next TV tested a configuration in which TBS, TruTV, and TNT played on three separate windows tuned to Sling TV, along with a window devoted to Paramount Plus' live CBS feed.
So yes, we could easily watch five college basketball games at once on our Macbook Pro, connected to a 32-inch Hewlett-Packard LCD monitor, in the middle of a work weekday, if it comes to that ... and more, it the situation demands it.
With our Trojans 23-4 and looking at a 6th seed, it feels good to be ready.
