November 24, 2025
Welcome to the fourth annual edition of The 40 Most Important People in Streaming, in which we profile the key executives driving streaming and its alphabet soup of acronyms โ SVOD, AVOD, TVOD and FAST.
Our fourth annual list has quite a few new names, including Cindy Holland, who brought original content to Netflix and now leads streaming at the new Paramount, a Skydance Corporation; Netflix CFO Spencer Neumann, who oversees billions in annual content spending while keeping investors confident in Netflixโs long-term profitability; Salek Brodsky, under whose leadership Samsung TV Plus has become one of the largest FAST services globally; and Stephen Hodge, who heads OTTera, a global leader in OTT solutions powering hundreds of AVOD, SVOD, TVOD and FAST services worldwide.
As always, our finalists were selected by a blue-ribbon committee of Media Play News editors and prominent industry leaders, who relied on both nominations submitted by our readers and their own extensive knowledge and experience to come up with what we feel is our best list yet. And, as always, our definition of โimportantโ is subjective โ balancing revenue and subscriber counts against such other factors as content licensing and distribution, innovation and creativity, and enabling technologies and
services.
Please join us in congratulating the 40 most important people in streaming, class of 2025!
THOMAS K. ARNOLD: Streaming Grows Up
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Ted Sarandos & Greg Peters
Co-CEOs, Netflix
Despite sharing the CEO position, Sarandos and Peters continue to focus on their own niche components driving Netflixโs global dominance. Sarandos continues to champion original programming, AI for โbetter, fasterโ storytelling โ not as a replacement for major talent โ and Netflixโs role in โsaving Hollywoodโ through streaming….