The NFL has given the cold shoulder to the Internet since Al Gore invented the series of tubes, but now that’s all changed. Starting September 4th, NBC and the NFL will begin ad-supported streaming webcasts with a Thursday night game between the Washington Redskins and New York Giants. Each Sunday night after that for the rest of the football season, web watchers will get to see the Sunday Night Football game live, with 17 games webcast in all.

Beside the NFL’s thawing out toward the web, the way-cool thing about this is the extra features you’ll get by tuning into the webcast. Most intriguing is the ability to act like a TV director and punch up your choice of multiple camera angles, including “star cam” that gives you close-up views of your favorite big-name player. There will also be a live blog to chat with the broadcasters, picture-in-picture, lots of stats and the ability to watch highlights of parts of the game you may have missed.

Even though DVICE is part of NBC, we'll act like spoiled brats here and whine that these feeds won’t be in HD, but maybe that’ll be coming in a few years. This is the start of something big. Like we've said before, pretty soon all TV will be watched this way. Oh yeah, and that picture at the top of this story? Wishful thinking on my part.

Via NFL