Netflix recruits Amazon’s Kapil Suri to plug into India’s pipes

MUMBAI: Netflix has gone shopping in Amazon’s backyard. And it has come back with Kapil Suri. The streamer has hired the distribution veteran as its director, business development for India. Suri spent the past four years at Amazon as principal, mobile business development, where he led OTT and telco partnerships. Now he switches sides.

His brief at Netflix, sources say, is to build partnerships and open doors with telcos, DTH operators, banking, fintech, quick service restaurant chains and ecommerce platforms. In plain speak: get Netflix bundled into every pipe, plan and shopping cart that an Indian consumer touches. Suri will reportedly report to Laurent Uguen, vice president, APAC business development and strategic partnerships, who is based in South Korea. Suri will be based out of Mumbai.

He signed off from Amazon on LinkedIn earlier this month with a warm thank-you note. “This brings down the curtain on one of the most satisfying and fulfilling chapters of my career,” he wrote, adding that he was leaving “a far better, well-rounded, and more mature professional.”

Suri knows the distribution game inside out. He spent nearly a decade at IndiaCast working on DTH and telecom tie-ups, and about as long with the Walt Disney Company in India in pay TV distribution. Before that he put in a couple of years each in pay TV at Sony Pictures and Zee TV, where his career first went on air.

Pay TV taught him how to sell channels. Amazon taught him how to sell streaming through telcos. Netflix is betting he can now do both for the red N.
The curtain has come down at Amazon. Over at Netflix, Suri’s next episode is about to start streaming.