The NFL's international experiment stopped in Melbourne, Australia, this weekend, and Netflix has now told us how many people actually watched. CNBC's Alex Sherman ran through the numbers on Fast Money, and the short version is the league's streaming era keeps gaining ground.

This is another step in the NFL's slow move off broadcast TV, and it still feels weird to me. I grew up with Monday Night Football as an appointment broadcast, three channels and a TV Guide. Netflix has been grabbing live games for a while now, and a matchup played in Australia is exactly the kind of global event the platform was built for. No blackout rules, no regional sports network nonsense, one feed for the whole planet.

The Melbourne game is part of the league's push into markets where American football has always been a curiosity. Australia has a real grassroots football scene, and the NFL has been eyeing the country the way it once eyed London. Remember when a regular season game in the UK sounded absurd? London now hosts multiple games a year and sells out every one. The league is clearly hoping Melbourne follows the same path.

For Netflix, the math is different. Live sports are expensive, and the platform picks its rights carefully. But every NFL game it streams doubles as a proof of concept for its live infrastructure, which had a famously rough debut with the Love Is Blind reunion. Set that stumble next to a clean live broadcast from the other side of the planet and you can see why the company wants these numbers public. It's a message aimed at advertisers and rights holders as much as fans.

The viewership figure matters for another reason too: it tells the NFL whether the Australia bet has legs. International games live or die on casual local viewers, not diehards setting alarms for odd hours. Sherman gets into that breakdown, including how the streaming number stacks up against the traditional broadcast windows the league uses as a baseline.

I've watched this transition with mixed feelings. Part of me misses just turning on a game and knowing where it lives. Another part of me spent years importing Famicom cartridges and waiting months for news to cross the Pacific, so I'm probably the wrong guy to complain about friction. If a kid in Melbourne can watch an NFL game as easily as I watched the Bears on a Sunday, the world got smaller in a good way.

The open question is what Netflix does with the momentum. The NFL's next media rights cycle is coming, and every successful stream from a far-flung locale strengthens the case that these games belong on a global platform instead of a regional network. The Melbourne numbers are one data point. The trend line they feed is the real story.