Global television

THE CANADIAN HEAD OF HBO HOME ENTERTAINMENT TAKES HER ACT ON THE ROAD

Connie Sarvanandan has been doing a lot of travelling since she started her new job as the head of Home Box Office Inc.’s international home entertainment business. It’s early October and she’s back in Toronto after a few days in Los Angeles and tomorrow she will fly to France for a four-day conference. Then she will return to that country the following week on another trip that will take her to Germany as well.

It sounds hectic, but Sarvanandan isn’t complaining; far from it. After successfully growing HBO’s presence in Canada by managing the group responsible for DVD, Blu-ray and electronic sellthrough product sales, she’s more than ready to do the same thing globally. “I have a tremendous amount of support at home that allows me to do a job I love,” she says from her office in downtown Toronto. “But to be fair, this is my busiest month and I’m grateful HBO has made international important.”

Sarvanandan started working with HBO in 2008. She became managing director for HBO Home Entertainment in Canada in 2011 and helped open HBO’s first Canadian office in Toronto that same year. One year later, she was promoted to vice-president, Canada, and added Latin America to her portfolio in 2013. Now, thanks to her latest promotion, she oversees HBO’s Home Entertainment business in 70 countries outside of the U.S., including the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Australia and, of course, Canada, which combined account for the lion’s share of HBO’s international business.

Sarvanandan recalls Canada being a “pretty underdeveloped market” when she started working for HBO, with consumers here far less familiar with the brand than was the case south of the border. “People knew it, but it didn’t have the awareness,” she says. “I mean and everybody had heard of, but other shows like they would not have necessarily known.”

As a result, there was always an expectation that HBO’s Canadian business would grow. Still, Sarvanandan says it has been a bit of a surprise that so much of that growth has come from the company’s library of shows that are no longer on air. The launch of HBO Canada in 2008 has certainly helped on this front, but she believes the growth is also partly due to the solid relationships that have been fostered in recent years with the country’s retailers as well as her group’s commitment to promoting HBO content to customers, whether that’s through advertising or in-store displays.

“We were an untapped market here so we really took advantage of that and worked with retailers to bring HBO to Canadians and they ate it up,” she says. Sarvanandan sees no reason why that can’t be