AVOD service Canela Media snags Pluto TV's Shampa Banerjee

Canela Media, an AVOD streaming service with content dedicated to Hispanic viewers, has appointed Shampa Banerjee as the company’s first chief product and technology officer (CPTO). She’ll primarily be tasked with driving user engagement across Canela's OTT portfolio.

Banerjee is joining Canela Media from Pluto TV, where she served for two years as chief product officer as well as EVP for ViacomCBS (now Paramount Global). At Pluto TV, Banerjee’s product strategy helped the platform grow to 50 million monthly active users. Prior to that, she spent five years as CPO at Eros Digital, an India-based OTT platform. Her background in digital media and large-scale software-as-a-service platforms has helped businesses generate tens of millions to billion dollars in revenue.

Shampa Banerjee
Shampa Banerjee (Canela Media)

As Canela Media’s CPTO, Banerjee will lead the company’s Innovation Lab, which analyzes the role of AI, machine-learning and Web 3.0 community-focused tools in the streaming video industry. She’ll also be responsible for building a cross-functional leadership team across product management, UX and engineering. Banerjee will report to Canela Media Founder and CEO Isabel Rafferty.

“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,” Banerjee said in a statement. “By allowing brands to advertise with trust and creators to collaborate directly with their fans, all Canela’s stakeholders will gain a real sense of ownership and belonging.”

Canela nabbing Banerjee comes only a couple of months after Canela completed a $32 million Series A funding round. The investment was co-led by venture capital firms Acrew Capital and Angeles Investors, with Tegna Ventures and Samsung Next also participating. Canela plans to use this financing to add 95 new positions across its engineering, operations and programming departments.

Richard Wolpert, venture partner at Acrew Capital, said in a February statement, “We continue to see significant business opportunities and growth coming from the U.S. and Latam Hispanic consumer segment, particularly in streaming media where consumers are looking for viewing options tailored to not only their language, but also their content consumption desires.”

Canela Media launched its AVOD service in 2020, offering a variety of FAST channels through partners like Samsung and LG. Canela boasts a reach of over 50 million U.S. viewers across OTT products and 180 Spanish content sites. 

Further supplementing the growth of the U.S.’s Hispanic viewership, Univision – a Spanish language free-to-air TV network and the U.S.’ largest provider of Spanish-language content – launched last year PrendeTV, its AVOD service offering over 10,000 hours of VOD content.

Canela also launched in 2021 its Canela Music app, which provides curated Latin-American music programming. The app is available to download for both iOS and Android.