The American professional football league or NFL is busy trying to script an exciting season— and this can just prove to be advantageous to Amazon Prime Video, which is a media partner.

The excitement and anxiety at the NFL is understandable. Add into it a new television partner paying $1.2 billion a season to carry those games for 11 years, and the pressure is ratcheted up even more.

Yet, despite all the hurdles. Amazon Prime Video is pleased about its slate of games for its first season as the exclusive carrier of “Thursday Night Football”.

The Los Angeles Chargers-Kansas City Chiefs matchup on Sept. 15 was announced two weeks ago, while the remaining 14 games were unveiled on Thursday as part of the full rollout of the NFL regular-season schedule.

“We’re very excited. We think we have some can’t-miss games. A lot of these are all about the matchup,” an AP report quoted Marie Donoghue, Amazon’s vice president of Global Sports Video, as saying.

Donoghue said Amazon made their first formal pitch to the league’s broadcasting department the week before the Super Bowl to let them know about their focus and priorities. As with all of the networks, discussions continued up until the final schedule was set.

Even though Amazon is the league’s first new broadcast partner since Fox in 1994, Donoghue is familiar with the process as a senior VP at ESPN for 19 years. Jeffrey Kaiser, Amazon’s head of US Sports Programming, was with NFL Network for five years.

Hans Schroeder, the executive vice president of NFL Media, also noted there was a little bit of a familiarity process with Amazon because they had partnered with CBS, Fox and NFL Network on a tri-cast model for Thursday night games for five seasons.

“You’ve really got a long and strong runway of great games, hopefully, that help build that behavior and customer awareness that Thursdays are now on Amazon,” Schroeder said.

Every team will play on Thursday, but the New York Giants, Minnesota and Detroit will not appear on the Amazon package. All three are playing on Thanksgiving. Buffalo and New England are also playing on Thanksgiving before meeting each other the next week.

As with every league partner, Amazon also will have a preseason game when San Francisco faces Houston on Aug. 25.

Donohue and Schroeder said that there will be plenty of opportunities to notify people where and how to tune into the games. They will also be available on stations in the participating teams’ markets, which is the same practice when they are on ESPN and NFL Network.

Indianbroadcastingworld.com feels that Amazon’s investments in sporting properties is a positive sign that could lead to similar arrangements with professional sports leagues in India too.

Amazon is said to have shown interest in India’s money-spinning IPL. The media rights for the cricket league will be decided over the next 45 days or so as other biggies like Reliance Industries and Uday Shankar-James Murdoch-backed Viacom18, Disney-Star India, Sony and Zee too are in the race to bag the media rights. A couple of international broadcast companies too have picked up tender documents, probably for the global rights.