Go ahead, pick your platform.

Thursday night's matchup featuring the New England Patriots and Tampa Bay Buccaneers can be seen in classic, over-the-air broadcast fashion on CBS, via cable on NFL Network, or — if you’re an Amazon Prime subscriber — the stream is there for the clicking.

The folks at NFL headquarters call it a “tri-cast” — which equates to more ways to consume games, increased audience potential and, of course, more money.

The debate used to be where to watch a game — home, at a sports bar or maybe a buddy's viewing party. Those are still the most popular options for viewing the ultimate “TV sport.” Yet in a digital environment with evolving viewing habits for the younger generation, the decision increasingly may involve how to watch a game.

Cord-cutters, rejoice.

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“Millennials basically watch everything on their mobile devices and don’t watch TV,” New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, chairman of the NFL’s broadcast committee, told USA TODAY Sports.

“We’re exploring the best ways to connect with that.”

Bolstered by technology, the NFL is now in the takeout business.

Last October, a friend of mine was torn between the prospect of attending Game 5 of the National League Division Series between the Washington Nationals and Los Angeles Dodgers or watching a Thursday night matchup of the Denver Broncos and San Diego Chargers.

Turns out, he did both. He watched football on his phone between pitches while sitting in the bleachers at Nationals Park.

Then there was the time my teenage son, a totally hyper Baltimore Ravens fan, bailed on me as we watched Monday Night Football. Given his early rise for school, sleep was more important. He missed the dramatic ending, when the Ravens beat the Cleveland Browns with a “kick six” — Will Hill’s 64-yard return of a blocked field goal as time expired.

The next morning’s exchange:

— Me: “Dude, you missed a great ending last night."

— Teenager: “I saw it this morning! That was sweet!”

Turns out, he watched the highlights on his phone at 5:30 a.m. This is the new normal.

“When you live with teenagers, you realize that young people still want their content,” Los Angeles Rams general manager Les Snead told USA TODAY Sports.

Snead and his wife Kara, formerly an NFL Network host, are raising 16- and 13-year old sons and a 12-year old daughter.

“In my household, we don’t really have a television,” he said. “We have one downstairs that’s used more for the X-Box. And, often times, if there’s a sporting event we want to see, we may be upstairs around the computer watching it, and the kids may be mirroring you. But they’re on their little phones watching it.”

Count the ways to watch a game (or portions of a game). There’s the NFL Mobile package for Verizon customers. The Red Zone Channel, as part of the Sunday ticket on DirecTV. Streaming on X-Box, Apple TV, Firefox or the TV Stick, among others. The Watch ESPN app, meanwhile, is good for Monday Night Football and other programming. For Sunday Night Football, there are enhanced viewing options — including different camera angles, real-time stats and social media engagements — on the NBC website and the NBC Sports mobile app. The other network partners, CBS and Fox, have apps, too.

And did I mention the NFL app on Microsoft? I watched the Ravens-Jacksonville Jaguars game from London last month, carried exclusively by Yahoo!, on my laptop in a hotel in California.

“Now it’s anytime, anywhere,” Dick Ebersol, former chairman of NBC Sports, mused to USA TODAY Sports. “The digital explosion has really helped the NFL.”

This is just the beginning, with the ubiquitous NFL streaming into a bigger pie that will impact future broadcast packages. After Twitter paid a reported $10 million to carry 10 Thursday night games last year, which averaged 266,000 viewers, the NFL hitched up with Amazon for a one-year streaming deal reportedly worth $50 million to the league for a similar package of Thursday games. The first Amazon Prime game (with added value to tap a global audience), pitting the Green Bay Packers and Chicago Bears last week, reached an estimated 372,000 viewers who stayed an average of 55 minutes, while 1.6 million customers initiated a stream.

Those are hardly huge numbers in the NFL environment. By comparison, Bears-Pack drew 14.6 million viewers on CBS. But league spokesman Joe Lockhart contends that one of the key takeaways from the Twitter experiment last year was that the additional platform represented “additional audience” that didn’t decrease viewership from the conventional broadcast and cable platforms.

The Twitter experiment also revealed a demographic fact of life.

“The audience definitely skewed a lot younger,” Amanda Herald, NFL vice president of media strategy and business development, told USA TODAY Sports. “It was even younger than expected.”

Still, despite the streaming mobile users, nothing comes close to matching the big-screen experience — at least for the more seasoned viewers. But the younger generation has grown up watching videos on phones, tablets and such.

“It will be interesting to see,” Herald added, “if they will watch for a longer period of time.”

Kraft clearly recognizes what the viewing patterns might mean in the long run. While the streaming deals of the past two years are exclusive from the traditional national TV packages, business models always evolve. Sure, the NFL has built an empire with games available for free on over-the-air networks. But given the growth of tech giants and changing viewing habits, maybe it’s Amazon today, Google tomorrow.

The NFL’s current TV deals, averaging a reported $7 billion per year, expire in 2022.

“We’re creating a data base,” Kraft said. “This will be very helpful when we have discussions for our next TV contracts in six years.”

Who knows? In six years, we could be talking NFL Singularity.

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Follow NFL columnist Jarrett Bell on Twitter @JarrettBell

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