Bela Bajaria, Netflix’s chief content officer and a senior executive at the company for the past decade, is leaving the streaming service immediately, the company announced on Thursday.
Peter Rice, the former Fox and Disney executive, will take on the role of head of content next week, Netflix announced.
The company made this sudden and sweeping leadership change as it faced a stagnation in engagement rates and a slowdown in growth. Just one day earlier, ; this was the largest wave of since 2022.
Netflix late last year to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery’s studio and streaming business, but lost the bidding war to Paramount Skydance. (Skydance, led by David Ellison, into its own ranks for $111 billion). Netflix’s stock price has fallen nearly 40% over the past 12 months.
“Generally, we’re not growing as fast as we’d like, and we’re working to accelerate this move,” said the company’s co-CEO Ted Sarandos at a Bloomberg conference a few weeks ago.
On Thursday, he conveyed to his employees in a message: “We’ve had a series of eventful days here, and I know we’ve burdened you with a lot of news and information to digest. But we all know well that what we do at Netflix is change.”
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