New Delhi: India will get a bigger slice of Netflix’s $17 billion content budget given the growing engagement with its offerings and rising revenue from viewers in the country, co-CEO Ted Sarandos said at the Economic Times Global Business Summit on Friday.

“In India, we’ve had the best year of our existence,” he said. “Our content watching grew by 30% last year in India and our revenue grew by 25%.”

Engagement is the key measure of success, Sarandos said, and growth indicators have to start with this.

“Do people care enough to spend their viewing time with you? Are they spending their screen time with Netflix? That's why that engagement metric is so important,” he said during the session, Cracking The Content Code.

“It wouldn't have happened if it wasn't tied to that engagement lift. Subscriber numbers make nice headlines, but they're not a real business metric. What is behind that subscriber number? Is there engagement? Is there revenue? Is there profit with Netflix? Yes, there is,” Sarandos said.

The company plans to plough more resources into India. “You are basically trying to constantly get just ahead of or just behind the growth in the market and figure out what's working and keep investing,” he said. “So I would say that we are going to be investing more and more in India as we continue to grow engagement and revenue.”

Netflix has a strong slate of content coming up for India, he said. “This idea of really getting into the grid, into the rhythm and the groove of local tastes and local desire…I think we're better at that than we ever were. The reason that we got there is that our team that runs India, runs it from India,” Sarandos said.

The key to success in the country was having teams on the ground with a feel for what people want, he said. “A lot of companies that try to run India out of California get frustrated early on because they just don't learn anything. Here, our team really does understand the local culture and the local storytellers. And they themselves are part of the local audience — that gives us a large advantage. That's why we've invested so heavily on not just production in India, but we have 250 people in an office in Mumbai. We have an office in Delhi. These are people who really care about making great content in India.”

Netflix has produced 100 original projects in India so far with 28 of them last year. Sarandos said the India team is getting better every day. “What I figured out early on when we started launching in various countries is that you didn't learn much in one country that was helpful in the next country,” he said.

“You have to be there, you have to be on the ground, and you have to understand consumer tastes and you have to understand the culture. You have to understand the history of the industry.”

He cited new Netflix release, The Romantics, about the legacy of Yash Chopra, as an example. “You have to understand creators in that country,” he said. “What are the challenges to getting movies made and series made? And in the case of India, I think India has got this beautiful, rich cinema culture and it was not that much around television at that time when we first got here. So, Sacred Games was our kind of early attempt to say, well, what if you took the principles of cinema and infused them into television and the Indian audiences loved that.”

His top priority is reigniting growth at the company, Sarandos said.