Netflix’s Ted Sarandos reflects on India launch, questions timing of Sacred Games: 'The addressable market is growing'

Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos has admitted he may have misjudged the company’s launch strategy in India, saying that releasing Sacred Games as the first Indian original may not have been the ideal starting point.

Speaking about Netflix’s slower-than-expected growth in the Indian market, Sarandos to Nikhil Kamath on the latter's podcast, “It took us a couple of years to get the product-market fit right. Our very first Indian original show was Sacred Games. And I thought, ‘This is going to be great. People in India love movies. This is a TV show that feels as big as a movie, it has movie stars.’”

He went on to reflect on the cultural gap and said, “What’s interesting about it is that it was very, very novel, but what I didn’t understand was that we were introducing a brand new kind of entertainment in a country the size of India.”

Sarandos admitted that, in hindsight, he might have taken a different approach. “If I did it all over again, would I have done Sacred Games a couple of years later, and did things that were more populist instead? Maybe.”

Despite the challenges, he remains optimistic about the future. “We knew that India was going to be a slower journey to get to where we wanted to get to. But it’s a great prize, at the end of the day. The addressable market is growing in the next couple of years in India, so it’s exciting,” he said.

About Sacred Games

‘Sacred Games’ follows Sartaj Singh (Saif Ali Khan), a troubled Mumbai police officer who receives a cryptic call from gangster Ganesh Gaitonde (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), warning him to save the city within 25 days. 

The series, developed by Vikramaditya Motwane and Anurag Kashyap, was based on Vikram Chandra’s novel and became Netflix’s first original Indian series. Development began in 2014, after Netflix VP Erik Barmack approached Motwane to create Indian content.