On Thursday, Twitter will live-stream an NFL game for the first time ever. Football fans can watch the New York Jets play the Buffalo Bills on Twitter.com, or Twitter’s mobile app, or through Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV or Xbox One, via a new Twitter app on those services. Or you can watch it on traditional cable on CBS—but where’s the excitement in that?

It’s all part of a deal Twitter scored back in April to stream 10 Thursday Night Football games this year, and it’s part of Twitter’s effort to be the No. 1 go-to place for live, social sports content—discussion, scores, video, everything.

But Snapchat wants to be that too, and with its new NFL channel, Snapchat might be better suited to attract young, tech-savvy NFL fans than Twitter. (Facebook wants in, too: this year it launched a new Sports Stadium section for sports talk, though the feature has not generated much buzz.)

Yahoo (parent company of Yahoo Finance) was the first digital media platform to globally live-stream an NFL game for free last year, an experiment that went reasonably well (15.2 million people tuned in). For this year, Twitter was the victor of a larger bidding process that was rumored to include Google, Facebook, and Amazon at one point. Twitter reportedly paid between $10 million and $15 million for the privilege.

Whether the privilege was worth the cost will depend on Twitter selling advertisements during the game. The company’s deal with the NFL does not allow it to sell all of the advertisements that will run during the stream (Yahoo’s deal did), just some of them, equivalent to the number of local ads you see on TV when you watch a game. Most of the national ads that run on CBS (or NBC, depending on the night) during the Thursday Night Football games Twitter streams will also show up on the Twitter stream.

For Twitter, this was a smart deal. Cord-cutters now have a myriad of options for watching an NFL game on Thursday night for free using some kind of connected device. They can watch it on a phone in a bar, or on an iPad on the bus, or at home on a TV, or on their computer on a train.

But will they?

Snapchat cut its own NFL deal for this season that steals a little bit of Twitter’s NFL thunder. The NFL has the first ever sports channel in Snapchat’s Discover tab. It is a two-year partnership for which the NFL will create exclusive clips and add them to the channel for all 256 regular-season NFL games. The channel can include full text articles, fun social games, highlight clips, commentary from NFL Network on-air talent, and behind-the-scenes videos from locker rooms.