Peters has a lower profile than, say, co-CEO Ted Sarandos, or even just-elevated Head of Global TV Bela Bajaria. But he’s the guy, after a dozen years, who’s figuring out how to tweak the user interface or bump up the price, or give away the service for a weekend in one big corner of the planet.
Peters is one of a handful of people on every quarterly earnings call. And this year, he added chief operating officer to his previous title of chief product officer . So, he’s crucial if not always noticed outside the world’s biggest streaming-video company. That makes him a lock for a list of people to watch in streaming video.
Peters had career stops at several companies a long way from Hollywood, including Wine.com, Red Hat and NOCpulse, before becoming a senior executive at video-technology firms Mediabolic and Rovi (before it merged with TiVo).
We think that giving everyone in a country access to Netflix for free for a weekend is a great way to expose ... people to the amazing stories we have ...”
Greg Peters
Peters joined Netflix in 2008, initially as chief streaming and partnerships officer for nearly nine years, before becoming chief product officer in 2017. Now he’s in an even more central position with the streaming giant, even as it continues to evolve its succession strategy, and its customer-acquisition strategy across the globe.
Peters will continue to experiment with the Netflix value proposition across the world. Even as the company ended its free promo offering in the United States, Peters talked at Netflix’s latest earnings call about going free for everyone in India (a country with 1.3 billion people and perhaps Netflix’s single biggest growth opportunity).
“We think that giving everyone in a country access to Netflix for free for a weekend is a great way to expose a bunch of new people to the amazing stories that we have … and how the service works, really create an event, and hopefully get a bunch of those folks to sign up,” Peters said.
Expect to see Peters continue to pull the strings on price hikes, free weekends, interface tweaks and so much more that makes Netflix the most dominant streaming-video service on the planet.
