Thursday night will serve as the kickoff to the 2024 NFL season.

It was only three years ago the NFL signed a media rights deal that welcomed Amazon Prime Video (AMZN) into the fold as the exclusive home of Thursday Night Football.

At the time, the $13 billion, 11-year deal was viewed as a disruptive force that would forever alter the state of television and the status quo of sports media rights.

But more than any other major league, the NFL loves television and its wide distribution. Case in point: Within its new media rights deal was news the NFL would return to Disney's (DIS) ABC network on Monday nights, with the network also airing the Super Bowl in 2027 and 2031, ending what will be a 21-year absence.

The league also kept its primary packages in place with CBS (PARA), Fox (FOXA), and NBC (CMCSA). Moreover, the Amazon games are still broadcast over the air for free on local networks.

"The model for us, today at least, is we want to be on linear and digital," Hans Schroeder, executive vice president and COO of NFL Media, told Yahoo Finance. "Streaming is clearly continuing to grow, and I think that'll be a bigger and bigger part of our future as we look forward."

"But to us, it's not an 'either-or' ... Pay TV is under a tremendous amount of pressure, but we've always been more tethered to broadcast and free to air."

Historically, the NFL has been careful not to place too much of itself and its games behind a paywall.

Yet, in the last two seasons, that strategy has begun to shift in what the league describes as "the next step" of its product.

Netflix (NFLX), which previously said it wasn't interested in the business of live sports, inked a three-season deal with the NFL earlier this year to air Christmas Day games. The streamer reportedly coughed up about $75 million per game, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Similarly, Peacock will host one exclusive in-season game — a Friday night game in Brazil on the season's first weekend — after it aired an exclusive Wild Card playoff game last season. The platform, which paid a reported $110 million for the rights to the playoff game, saw a significant lift in subscribers as a result.

Google's YouTube TV (GOOG, GOOGL) now holds the exclusive rights to NFL Sunday Ticket, which makes out-of-market games available to fans nationwide.

"You have to meet consumers where they are," Anthony Palomba, professor of business administration at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, told Yahoo Finance. "That is something that I think up until recently has been lost on all of the major CEOs of media companies. You can't keep doing what's familiar."

Schroeder said the shift to more digital-first, streaming partners is one that "feels less revolutionary this year" and "more like the next step in the evolution."

"For us, it all starts with wanting wide, broad reach of our games," he said. "That's why 85% [of our games] are on broadcast television. It's really a smaller part that aren't. All games are on broadcast in their home markets."

"But we also need to be smart. We know our fans are increasingly spending their time on other screens, other platforms, and we need to be on those platforms too."

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