Shampa Banerjee, a seasoned streaming exec who held senior posts at Eros International and Pluto, has been named chief product and technology officer at Canela Media.
Venture-funded Canela operates a portfolio of websites as well as free, ad-supported streaming services Canela TV and Canela Music.
Banerjee will report to Isabel Rafferty, Canela’s founder and CEO.
A trained physicist with an extensive background in technology, Banerjee will lead Canela’s Innovation Lab in addition to her executive duties. The lab was created to develop new revenue models for industry areas like production and distribution.
“Consumers are discerning — they know what they want and they know where to find it,” Banerjee said. “I am energized by Canela’s deliberate commitment to redefine digital media experiences for the Hispanic community — our strategy, to challenge our team to create products and services that meet and ultimately exceed the needs of this rapidly-growing, sophisticated audience is the opportunity of a lifetime.”
Rafferty said the company’s focus on innovation “remains our primary focus,” and the organization will “look to Shampa’s deep experience at the intersection of technology and media to transform our business and our industry.”
In 2020, Banerjee joined ViacomCBS-owned Pluto as its chief product officer, following her stint at Eros, which is best-known in the U.S. for its still-unwinding merger with STX.
Before working at Eros Digital, Banerjee helped prepare social enterprise collaboration platform Socialtext for a $1.4 billion sale and also was CTO at Ziff Davis Media.
In addition to Master’s degrees in physics from Case Western Reserve University and the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, Banerjee has a PhD in theoretical physics from Kent State University.
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