John Guppy, a veteran soccer executive who founded Gilt Edge Soccer Marketing, said, “What they’ve done — and it’s not that Fox didn’t do it, but maybe it comes across more directly to consumers — is they’ve made the Premier League feel special and important.”

NBCSN has become the NBC Sports Group’s Premier League centerpiece, filling as many as 40 hours a week on the cable network. Mark Lazarus, chairman of the NBC Sports Group, said the kickoff times of Premier League games, as early as 7:45 a.m. on Saturdays on the East Coast, had helped. Even the day’s latest matches start before American football games begin to dominate the channel lineup.

“They’re largely in windows without live sports,” Lazarus said. “It’s not totally unencumbered, with college football Saturday afternoon and the N.F.L. on Sunday. But the beauty of this league is that it goes from August to May.”

The Premier League’s success has helped Major League Soccer, which also has games on NBCSN. Viewership of the eight M.L.S. games on the network since coverage of the Premier League began on NBCSN has jumped 60 percent, and the number of unique visitors to M.L.S. games streamed by NBC has soared 322 percent. All of that should help M.L.S. in talks to extend its contract beyond next season.

For the NBC suite of networks, the Premier League was a property to covet. NBC wanted to capitalize on the league’s popularity and to breathe oxygen into NBCSN, which will show 154 of the 196 games that the NBC family of networks is televising; NBC is showing 21 games this season, with others on CNBC, USA, Telemundo and Mun2.

Another 184 games, which are not being televised, are available free at Premier League Extra Time, a service available to cable, satellite and telephone subscribers. The entire season of 380 games is being streamed on NBC Sports Live Extra.

Lazarus is politic enough not to declare that NBCSN’s identity has quickly become tied inextricably to the Premier League. That would irk other leagues it carries or longtime properties, like the Tour de France. NBCSN also carries the Olympics every two years.