Tonight, for the first time this fall, many millions of viewers will tune in to watch the Jets and Bills battle on Thursday Night Football. Many, even most, will watch the same way they've always watched football: on television. They'll flop down onto the couch with remote in hand, or crowd into a sports bar with a pitcher of PBR.

But a few, or some, or maybe even a lot, will tune in a completely new way: by tapping on the Twitter icon.

Twitter won the Thursday Night Football deal despite bidding less than its rivals. Why? Because Twitter's already the place people go when football's on.

If you watch the game tonight on Twitter, you'll mostly watch a fairly standard video stream. There will be ads where there are always ads, and commentators where there are always commentators. Underneath it, you'll see a stream of tweets, the best of Football Twitter curated for you by Twitter's algorithm. Players, refs, reporters, self-hating Jets fans. It doesn't matter whether you're logged in, or you've ever used Twitter before. The experience will be the same for everyone at first, but eventually, Twitter plans to personalize the feed for each user. You can watch the game anywhere Twitter runs—on your phone; in your browser; or in Twitter's new apps for the Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, and Xbox. Twitter's even working on syndicating its video, so you can watch the game anywhere you can see tweets. Well, not quite yet: Twitter's working with a few partners, like Sports Illustrated, but more are coming soon. We promise to embed football as soon as we can.

Twitter is already entrenched as a second-screen experience. Users will watch a sports game or an awards show on TV, phone in hand, tweeting and scrolling and faving. But it's just one of a number of companies trying to turn that second-screen experience into a first-screen play. Merging live TV and the social sphere has proven tricky. All anyone knows is that it involves the Internet in some way. Now they're working on how viewers find stuff to watch when the list of options is effectively infinite. They also need to build the necessary infrastructure to stream a live event to tens of millions of people simultaneously—your cable box doesn't pause to buffer when it's third and 10 and the ball's in mid-air.