Veteran media industry executive Nikhil Gandhi has joined MX Player as Chief Operating Officer (COO), after 1.5 years of a stint as the Head of ByteDance-owned short video app TikTok where he was leading its growth in the Middle East, Turkey, Africa, India, and South Asia.

The news was shared by Nikhil on his LinkedIn profile, where he shared the position of Chief Operating Officer of MX Player.

Based out of Mumbai and Singapore for this role, Gandhi was responsible for taking the platforms to their next phase of growth by expanding its geographical reach, enhancing data-driven innovation, growing the scope and scale of revenue streams, and building maximum impacts for all stakeholders – be it customers, advertisers, or internal teams across verticals.

Before joining TikTok, Gandhi was the president and COO of Times Television Network. His earlier stints include working in media conglomerates like The Walt Disney Company, UTV Global Broadcasting, and Viacom Media Networks.

Karan Bedi, Chief Executive Officer of MX Media said, “Nikhil brings decades of experience in both traditional and emerging media platforms, and will be a huge asset in taking MX to the next level of rocket-fueled growth. We look forward to working closely with him.”

Nikhil added, “MX Player is by far the leader in the video entertainment space. I’m super excited to join the MX team and look forward to the next phase of our growth.”

For unversed, MX Player is an OTT platform that caters to over 200 million monthly active users in India, integrating all forms of entertainment on one platform – including video playback, streaming video, music and gaming. The platform hosts a wide library of over 2,00,000 hours of premium content across 10 languages, including a critically acclaimed slate of MX Original/ Exclusives, movies, web series, TV shows, news and audio music. The app is available across Android, iOS, Web, Amazon Fire TV Stick, Android TV and OnePlus TV, amongst others.