Saturday night’s NFL playoff game between the Kansas City Chiefs and Miami Dolphins has big implications, and not just for the two teams weathering brutal conditions on the icy road to the Super Bowl. The online-only ‘cast likely represents the next big step in the collapse of broadcast and cable business models.

Comcast-owned NBCUniversal paid the league $110 million for exclusive streaming-only rights to the single game, to run on its consistently underachieving subscription service Peacock, now approaching its fourth birthday.

Leading up to the game, NBCU ran ads on CNBC and its other outlets, calling the streamcast “history making” because, technically, it is the first time this has been done with a playoff game.

That hype ignores that Amazon has been paying $1 billion a year to stream Thursday night regular-season games for two years. Amazon is paying another $100 million a year to stream a single game on Black Friday, a new slot for the league.

And Peacock and Paramount Global’s Paramount+ have been simul-streaming the same NFL games they broadcast on NBC and CBS respectively. So there’s been plenty of time to get used to streaming football, in some cases bringing innovations to what’s become a pretty hidebound viewing experience.

So here we are, with a game that means something and viewers having to go find it. NBCUniversal has done what it can to get the word out, beginning with those promo ads across its suite of networks.

During Saturday’s earlier playoff matchup featuring Houston and Cleveland, NBC repeatedly promoted the streaming matchup to come, pointed out its absence on the broadcast network, and ran QR codes on screen so fans could quickly sign up for Peacock.

Peacock’s ad-supported version runs only $5.99 a month, far less than cable subscribers typically pay each month. For what it’s worth, Peacock’s monthly fee is also less than what ESPN charges cable providers to carry its networks. But the notion of having to chase the game into streamingland enraged some fans. They’ll get over it, eventually.

Less likely to get over it, however, are the tattered business models of broadcast and cable networks. Last year, various NFL games occupied 93 of the year’s top 100 most-watched TV shows. What’s going to be left when TV’s most popular programming is fully available on streaming, even, gulp, the Super Bowl? The evidence suggests it’s going to be ugly.

For now, several big questions need to be answered, though most of the answers won’t be known for days, weeks, even months.

How many non-streamers will sign up just to watch the game? It is available on broadcast in the home market of both teams, but Kansas City in particular is one of the league’s marquee teams, with fans across the country, further boosted by the girlfriend of tight end Travis Kelce, the humongously popular Taylor Swift. Can the game pull big sign-ups for a service that has never been better than fifth or sixth in the streaming wars?

Once people have signed up, will they cancel as soon as the game is over, as some social-media grumps declared in recent days? Or will most of the new subs make like millions of others and forget to cancel, paying for months to come?

Conversely, will having the game on Peacock help the service retain existing subscribers who might otherwise churn out? Does it improve subscribers’ sense of value for money? Churn has been rising for all the big streaming services, even industry leader Netflix NFLX , as viewers get more picky and engaged.

Will the game help on that end, especially when it’s coupled with the imminent arrival of Christopher Nolan’s latest cinematic opus, Oppenheimer. Finally, Peacock subscribers have reason to stick around.

Not to be forgotten is what advertisers think about the whole thing. Ads during the game were pretty much indistinguishable from anything on NBC the past couple of decades: State Farm, Salesforce CRM , Applebee’s, Royal Caribbean RCL , all the usual suspects.

In part, advertisers’ responses will be gated by how much reach the game will ultimately have. Does Nielsen adequately capture the game’s full viewership, so advertisers know what they’re paying for? Will they have reason to demand “make-goods” because the audience is undersized?

More generally, it’s reasonable to ask how Peacock/NBCU will make back its $110 million investment. Even if millions of fans sign up for Peacock, viewership almost certainly will be lower than it might have been with NBC distribution as well.

Broadcast viewership overall is shrinking quickly but the networks still reach double the number of households that Peacock ever has. Subscriptions, plus ads, plus higher visibility and viability with a crucial audience, may add up to a lot of value for Comcast.

More generally, we still aren’t clear on Comcast’s overall video strategy. As the cable TV business faded, the No. 1 cable provider leaned hard into broadband, low-cost mobile services, and various technology ventures like the Xumo platform and hardware that it recently launched with No. 2 cable provider Charter Spectrum. Where do Comcast’s cable and broadcast networks fit in that vision, and for how long?

Hanging over everything is a bigger issue. Comcast CEO Brian Roberts is expected to be among those interested in making an acquisition or two, to better compete against Netflix and the tech giants with streaming operations. Consolidation seems inevitable, with Comcast a likely consolidator.

Most of the conversation lately has been on Paramount Global and controlling shareholder Shari Redstone’s new enthusiasm for selling. More likely later this year may be a deal with Warner Bros. Discovery, which could be merged into NBCU, all of it spun out of Comcast into a separate operation.

At the same time, more changes are coming. Late on Friday, news broke that Disney-owned ESPN has been in talks to sell a stake to the NFL, and would take over the league’s content-creation units such as NFL Films and its new mobile app, NFL+.

What that means for NBCUniversal, Paramount Global, Fox, and Amazon, which collectively are paying the league $100 billion over the next decade or so, is unclear.

Meanwhile, the streamcast gave us a rather forlorn idea of the future of broadcast. Instead of carrying the game, NBC carried the pre-game programming for as long as it could, while promoting the debut of a rebooted game show to fill part of the hole in its Saturday night programming. The swap of NFL playoff game for revived old game show is not a good look for the future of broadcasting.

Maybe the broadcasters will double down on the games coming in March from the United Football League, a minor league fashioned from two competing predecessors that will run games in the spring, when the NFL’s biggest programming is the annual draft. But grumpy social-media complaints regardless, Saturday’s game represents where broadcast and streaming are headed. Fans better get used to it.