Home Shopping Network/QVC

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Home Shopping Network/QVC

Home Shopping Network (HSN) and Quality, Value, Convenience (QVC) were responsible for a historic change in American consumer habits, and have become as much a feature of television as religious channels. These two cable television channels feature live broadcasts of themed sales presentations, 24 hours per day, during which viewers can call a toll-free telephone number, speak with the presenters live on the air, and order the products.

Home Shopping Network got its start in 1977 when a Clearwater, Florida, radio station agreed to accept an advertiser's merchandise in lieu of payment of an overdue bill. Saddled with 112 electric can openers, the station manager offered them for sale on the air. When they sold out instantly and callers clamored for other products, he established a regularly scheduled radio show called Suncoast Bargaineers. In 1981, the show moved to a local access cable channel in a Tampa Bay area and was given a new name: Home Shopping Channel. In 1985, it was renamed Home Shopping Network (HSN) and transmitted 24 hours per day through cable and broadcast television to a national audience, becoming a publicly quoted company on the American Stock Exchange in 1986.

In 1990, HSN stock became available on the New York Stock Exchange, and in 1995 Barry Diller, former Chairman of the Board and CEO of Paramount Pictures and Fox, was welcomed as Chairman of the Board of HSN. James Held, Senior Vice-President of Bloomingdale's department store was named President and CEO. In 1997, HSN's parent company (HSN, Inc.) acquired a controlling interest in Ticketmaster, the world's largest special events ticketing company. In 1998, after purchasing the majority of Universal Studios Inc.'s television assets, HSN, Inc. changed its name to USA Networks, Inc., and purchased the remainder of Ticketmaster. That year also saw the premiere of a Home Shopping Channel in Spanish, the result of a partnership with Univision. With 4,000 employees and more than five million active customers, by 1998 HSN had become an electronic retailing giant rivaled only by one other conglomerate: QVC.

HSN faced its first major competition in the electronic retailing forum in 1986. Quality, Value, Convenience (QVC), Inc., was founded in West Chester, Pennsylvania, by Joseph Segel, founder of the Franklin Mint. With revenues of over $112 million, QVC broke the American record for first full-fiscal-year sales by a new public company and, like HSN, QVC broadcast live 24 hours per day. By 1993, QVC boasted access to 80 percent of all U.S. cable-subscribing households. Reaching 64 million cable households and three million satellite dishes in the United States alone, QVC made more than two billion dollars in sales in 1997 as the result of 84 million phone calls and 56 million orders. QVC, through a 1997 joint venture with BSkyB in the U.K. and Ireland, reached an additional 6.6 million households, broadcasting live 17 hours per day. QVC became best known for its jewelry sales, which accounted for 35 percent of its programming time, and made it one of the world's largest purveyors of 14-carat gold and sterling silver jewelry. At times derogatorily referred to as QVCZ, the channel brought cubic zirconium to the forefront of the shopping public's consciousness with its sales of Diamonique, a low-cost alternative to diamonds.

Home shopping evolved from the world of impulse buying to become a relevant, meaningful form of shopping by the late 1990s. The customer base of HSN and QVC spans all socioeconomic groups, who share two common characteristics: cable subscription and above-average disposable income. The products offered on the channels vary from hour to hour because of the varying demographics of viewers at any given time. Because the channels offer unconditional, money-back guarantees on their products, consumers are able to shop with confidence. Many Americans now prefer to shop from home for the sake of convenience, but for bedridden or other homebound individuals, QVC and HSN offer a viable link to the outside world. Instead of relying solely on caregivers for their shopping needs, homebound people have access to a significant means to independence. The regular hosts of home shopping programs came to provide viewers with a sense of companionship because, unlike ordinary news or talk show hosts, the electronic retailers take calls directly from the viewing audience and, indeed, consider it their job to chat with the callers and not always push a hard sell. Many viewers avidly follow the hairstyles of the hosts, and what few personal details they can glean about them, speculating about their off-screen lives with the fervor of soap-opera fans.

Critics of home shopping held that it was tantamount to the downfall of Western civilization because it gave already television-dependent people yet another excuse to avoid the outside world. They found fault with the hyper-enthusiasm of the product-selling hosts, claiming that viewers were not even permitted to formulate their own emotional responses to the products because the hosts, like deadpan singers in a Greek chorus, force-feed reactions to the audience. However, the elimination of any room for (mis)interpretation is precisely what has appealed to so many consumers. Since every feature of a given product is described in detail, and the sometimes skeptical questions of callers answered candidly, live on the air, viewers feel secure in their understanding of the benefits and drawbacks of the product. Home shopping television may have helped internet shopping in its infancy. By the time retailers began to offer their wares on the world-wide web in the mid-1990s, channels like QVC and HSN had acclimated Americans to the concept of remote shopping. Consumers were thus less leery of giving their credit card numbers to a disembodied voice (in the case of home shopping channels) or to a faceless computer screen.

—Tilney Marsh