Bela Bajaria is out at Netflix, with Peter Rice taking her role as CCO.
Rumors of Bajaria’s ouster have been spreading in recent days, and the news comes as Netflix shed 1,000 employees, about 6 percent of its workforce.
Bajaria joined Netflix a decade ago as a vp, a few months after she was let go from NBCUniversal, where she had been president of Universal Television. She would ascend to lead all of its TV operations four years later and became its chief content officer in 2023.
Netflix has long had a corporate culture that largely eschewed layoffs (the cuts earlier this week were its first in four years) but favored individual teams making changes as needed. Netflix founder Reed Hastings famously ousted his co-founder Marc Randolph, and encouraged other senior leaders to make changes if they thought it would lead to a better outcome.
Hastings was fond of comparing Netflix to a sports team, making a point to say that the company was not a family. “If you say it’s like a championship sports team and we’ve got all these competitors and we want to win the championship, then people understand why the coaches make changes,” he told a Semafor podcast in August.
Rice, meanwhile, was a veteran of 20th Century Fox before joining The Walt Disney Co. with the studio’s acquisition. He rose to oversee all of Disney entertainment before being ousted by then-CEO Bob Chapek in 2022. Rice joined the LA28 Olympics group last year to oversee content for the games.
In a statement, co-CEO Ted Sarandos touted Bajaria as presiding over Netflix’s explosion in unscripted programming and expansion into live events and sports. Of Rice, he said the exec would help the company “continue to scale and deliver members more of the stories they love.”
Rice stated, “Netflix has fundamentally changed the way stories are made, shared and experienced around the world.”
In addition to Bajaria, Netflix execs who have been exited in recent days include VP in film Doug Belgrad and TV executives Lisa Lang McMullen, James Oh, Carolina Garcia and Andrew McQuinn.
Netflix’s layoffs this week came as the company seeks a reset amid slowing viewership growth. While Netflix remains very profitable and continues to see its business grow at a rapid clip, its viewership has not been as steady.
Sarandos lamented at the Bloomberg Screentime summit on Sept. 30 that “overall, we’re not growing as fast as I want us to, and we’re working on making that move faster.”
The company has, over the last few years, pushed hard into live sports and events, as well as into video podcasts and creator content, in a bid to diversify its viewership and keep that engagement growing even as it continued to invest in scripted and unscripted film and TV content.
“Bela has built and shaped a truly global Content organization, hiring brilliant people and empowering them to make good decisions. I am incredibly grateful to her for everything she’s done,” Sarandos wrote in a memo to staff. “I know this is a big change in a year that has already had its share. But I also see an opportunity to take our slate to the next level, especially in UCAN where we have an outsize impact in creating big, buzzy hits that our members love and drive conversation around the world.”