Sounds to me like the work his team was doing, annotating films with meta-data, is a stop gap situation. I presume Amazon is working on an automated system based on Mechanical Turk or crowd sourcing to do the annotating.
If this is indeed the case, it would not make sense to hire a full-time team.
I assumed the work he was doing was at a higher level than that - i.e. creating the software which allows the end user to see these annotations. In this case, it would need ongoing maintenance, which would be done best by a full time team who understand the code.
Either way, if he's good at what he does, it would make sense for the company to keep him on even if they move him to another project.
If this is indeed the case, it would not make sense to hire a full-time team.