Bela Bajaria, the 52-year-old former Miss India Universe pageant winner, who this week became the new chief content officer at Netflix, the world’s largest streaming service, is not renowned for her theories on television or film-making. Such public pronouncements as she has made tend to the bland and non-committal. Asked to name her favourite programmes in a recent New Yorker interview she replied ‘I’m a fan of TV. I work in TV. I watch everybody’s things. People have very different tastes, and I have no disdain for whatever those things are. What is quality? What is good versus not? That’s all subjective. I just want to super-serve the audience.’

Bajaria takes over at Netflix from one of the company’s longstanding stalwarts, and at critical juncture in the streaming service’s fortunes as it emerges from a difficult period post-Covid. Subscriber numbers and profits have fallen, and as the company undergoes a significant shift in structuring, Bajaria is charged with rebuilding its fortunes as the most powerful woman in TV. 

Her appointment comes in the week that Reed Hastings, one of the company's co-founders, announced that he was stepping down as co-chief executive of Netflix. He will stay on as executive chairman. The firm will now be run by Ted Sarandos, formerly head of content, whom Bajaria succeeds, and Greg Peters, chief operating officer and chief product officer.

As head of content, in charge of everything that comes out of Netflix - films, series, documentaries, foreign content - Bajaria occupies an executive office in the company’s Los Angeles headquarters, Icon Building, a 14-storey building resembling a Jenga game, which stands in the heart of old Hollywood, on the site of the old Warner Bros studios, where the first talking picture, The Jazz Singer was filmed in 1927. The historic Paramount studios are a short walk away. There could be no more potent symbol of how tech money has transformed the traditional film and television industries - what we watch, and how and when we watch it, and how significant Bajaria’s new role is.

2020 and 2021 - the Covid years - were good for Netflix. Subscriber numbers grew, and nobody was leaving the service because - as Tom Harrington, television analyst at Enders puts it, ‘why would you?’

Subscriptions fell in the first six months of this year, but figures released this week show that in the last quarter of 2022 Netflix added seven million new subscribers, which the company described as ‘far exceeding expectations’. The comedy horror show Wednesday was the third most popular series ever, Harry & Meghan the second most popular documentary series ever, and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery the fourth most popular film.

In the face of strong competition with the arrival of other services including Apple TV +, Amazon’s Prime, Paramount Plus and Disney +, Netflix has nevertheless managed to maintain its position as the leading streaming service, with 231 million subscribers around the world. 

‘In terms of the number of programmes it produces, the number of subscribers it has, the number of awards it gets, Netflix is very much the first cab on the rank,’ Harrington says. Bajaria’s role is to keep it there.  

Bajaria was born in 1970 in London to Indian parents, Ramesh and Rekha, who had met and married in Kenya but migrated to the UK specifically - her mother told the New Yorker - so that their children would have what they considered more desirable passports.

When Bajaria was five, her parents and younger brother moved to Los Angeles, leaving Bajaria in London to be looked after by her grandparents and continue her schooling. It would also provide an early immersion in television: Dallas and Dynasty were family favourites. When Bajaria was eight she joined her parents in Los Angeles, going on to study at Pepperdine, the Christian university in Malibu. It was there that she entered, and won, the Miss India California pageant, going on to be crowned Miss India U.S.A. and in 1991, Miss India Universe. 

The title led to an offer of an acting contract from a Bollywood studio. Her ambition had always been to be in the world of entertainment, but she turned down the Bollywood offer; instead she applied to a number of film and TV studios looking for work, which led to her being taken on by CBS as an assistant in the movies-and-miniseries department, reading scripts and spending hours in CBS's basement videotape library studying old films.

Rising through the ranks, in 1999 she commissioned a miniseries about Joan of Arc starring Leelee Sobieski, which was nominated for 13 Emmys. And in 2002, she was promoted to run the movies-and-miniseries department. In 2011 she joined Universal television, heading the in-house production studio, at the same time developing programmes to be sold to other other network platforms and, later, the new market of streaming services such as Hulu and Netflix, which Bajaria joined in 2016.

There is an apocryphal story that Reed Hastings, a tech entrepreneur, was inspired to start Netflix in 1995 after being charged $40 in late fees by his local Blockbuster store for a late return on Apollo 13.

It was two years later that Hastings, and Netflix’s co-founder Marc Randolph, a marketing executive, hit on the concept of a business that would avoid the tiresome trip to the video store by renting out DVDs over the internet. Unable to get hold of an actual DVD - then available only in a handful of test markets - they bought a compact disc from a music store, stripped it of its packaging and dispatched it in a greetings card envelope to Hastings’ home to see if it would arrive undamaged. It did. 

It was the beginning of a long and bitter battle with Blockbuster that culminated in the arrival of technology that allowed content to be streamed directly to computers and, eventually television. In 2007 Netflix launched its service, streaming content licensed from film and TV companies. 

A key to Netflix’s early success was encouraging ‘binge-watching’ by making whole series available online in one fell-swoop, obviating the need to wait to watch the next episode of a favourite show on TV. In 2013 the service took its first steps into producing its own original content, paying $100 million for two 13-episode series of House of Cards, the political drama starring Kevin Spacey. Its success with original productions was consolidated by the women’s prison drama Orange Is The New Black and The Crown, for which Netflix  committed to 20 episodes at the first meeting with the show’s British producers at a reported cost of £100 million.

By the time Bajaria joined the company it had risen to become one of the most potent forces in broadcasting, the world’s largest film and entertainment streaming service, with 151 million subscribers in 190 countries - almost everywhere except Syria, North Korea and China.

Bajaria led the company’s first forays into reality TV with programmes like Queer Eye, and as the head of licensing and co-production built subscriber numbers by streaming internationally shows from other companies archives, such as The Office.

In 2019, she became responsible for non-English TV programming, a growing element in Netflix. Last year out of a total of 1,846 hours of original content, less than half of that - 800 hours - was being produced in the US and Canada. The remainder was being produced, mostly for local audiences, in Netflix offices, or ‘ecosystems’ as they are called around the world, in a dazzling number of languages. In India, there are original programs not only in Hindi and English but in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Marathi, Kannada, and Bengali.

As head of global content she would travel the world, spending two or three days at a time at the most far-flung of the Netflix empire’s 26 outposts - Seoul, Mumbai, Mexico City, dressed in her favourite ‘travel blazer’ a designer jacket bejewelled on the breast pocket with the words ‘Art is truth’ and carrying a Louis Vuitton tote bag monogrammed with the bright-blue initials ‘BB.’ In her new role she brought in hit shows such as Squid Game, the biggest show in Netflix’s history, and Lupin. At home, she is married to the writer-producer Doug Prochilo, and they have a teenage son and two college-age daughters. She lives in Studio City, where she is often to be found on three and four mile hikes on the nearby mountain trails, and has an ownership interest in the Chicago Red Stars, who play in the US National Women’s Soccer League. 

But her growing importance in the company led to friction with Cindy Holland, Netflix’s vice-president for original content, who had played a key role in launching original Netflix shows such as House of Cards, Orange Is the New Black and Stranger Things, and who had increasingly come into conflict with Sarandos, arguing that Netflix were sacrificing quality for quantity.

 It was Bajaria’s success that in 2020 led Ted Sarandos to firing Holland, promoting Bajaria into the new role of global head of television, giving her oversight of all TV programming both in the United States and abroad. According to industry sources, Holland had been earning less than $10m a year; Bajaria’s salary is north of $16m.

Industry insiders say that Bajaria has risen by knowing not only what’s good - not even what’s good in some cases - but what will appeal to subscribers, and to shareholders. As one former colleague, speaking  anonymously to the New Yorker put it, ‘“The thing is, she’s not an intellectual. She’s smart. There’s a difference. She’s bold, and that’s what it takes.’

Talking to the New Yorker, she described the ideal Netflix show as what one of her V.P.s, Jinny Howe, calls a ‘gourmet cheeseburger’ - offering something premium and commercial at the same time.’ 

Bajaria’s and Netflix’s future fortunes depend on her serving up the burgers in as bold and smart a way she can.