QVC Plus, the home-shopping TV service’s streaming brand, on Friday is launching Outdoor Escape, a new around-the-clock streaming channel dedicated to gardening and outdoor living.

The seasonal channel will be hosted by popular QVC personality and gardening expert Sandra Bennett, Soumya Sriraman, who joined Qurate Retail Group last year as president of streaming, told Broadcasting+Cable.

Outdoor Escape will feature lifestyle shows from QVC and HSN and give viewers easy access to purchasing products.

Qurate‘s QVC and HSN, the oldest names in shoppable TV, are evolving their approach as streaming creates new ways for viewers to buy what they see on the screen.

While more traditional programmers are embracing shoppable TV technology to create incremental revenue streams, one of Sriraman’s priorities is making programming more human. 

"This is a company that has taken to heart storytelling and bringing emotion into commerce is at the core of what it does every single day,” said Sriraman, who was with Britbox and Amazon before joining Qurate.

At the same time, adding distribution via streaming gives QVC more opportunities to reach viewers and viewers more ways to consume programming, interact and make transactions.

The company's  QVC and HSN linear channels are available as free ad-supported streaming TV channels (FAST). s QVC Plus and HSN Plus stream on platforms including  Roku, Amazon Fire, LG, Xfinity Flx and Samsung Smart TV. It is also looking to create new free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) channels at a time when consumers are cutting the cord with traditional cable.

Last year, it created a seasonal Christmas in July channel.

“We found that to be hugely successful with our audience,” Sriraman said. “Audiences are responding to this idea of giving them channels they can watch and discover new products and new content as they sit back and watch.”

Gardening has been a mainstay on QVC’s main channel, making the category ripe for a streaming channel. For now, Outdoor Escape is available only on QVC’s app, but another channel, The Big Dish, is in the process of being distributed on more FAST platforms.

The company will see how Outdoor Escape performs. There’s a chance it will keep running past the summer. And the company has more seasonal channels in the pipeline. Some may be based on lifestyle categories, others may be built around the network’s personalities.

More Ways for Viewers to Buy

With streaming, viewers will have more ways to buy, including interacting with QR codes. Some viewers still like to call the channel to make purchases, though, Sriraman said. “We’re not limiting the ways people want to buy.”

On traditional TV, QVC pioneered shop-by-remote technology that the company will be rolling out on its streaming channel.

“The audience’s ability to transact and watch seamlessly is important, so the more opportunity someone has to get access to your channel, the more likely they are to deeper with you,” she said.

Streaming means “we now are not tethered to someone’s cable box,“ Sriraman said. ”You can take us with you wherever you go and you can watch our hosts that we know our audiences love, and you can discover things without having to be live.”

Sriraman is aware that traditional TV is looking for ways to build its commerce business. “It feels like everyone thinking about it as interactive ads,“ she said. ”We’ve always talked about it as interactive programming.”

It would appear likely that given the improvements in connectivity and technology, streaming viewers buy more stuff than TV viewers, but Sriraman said the company was not sharing that data. “We can say we’re super-excited about what we’ve seen since last year, and really excited about how the expansion of distribution on FAST is additive,” she said.

Sriraman is also looking forward to the launch of a new show, Design School with Ballard Designs, which will launch on QVC Plus March 24.

In each 30-minute episode, Ballard Design’s Caroline McDonald will guide viewers through the design process while tackling a challenge sent in by QVC viewers.

Design School will include shoppable entertainment features.

The show is designed to bring Ballard Design, traditionally a catalog brand, to life, Sriraman said.

“We all know that there are many things that are better told with video than in print or just static digital,” she said. "We’re very excited about the show.” ■

Qurate Retail Group, parent of TV shopping channels QVC and HSN, said it hired Soumya Sriraman as president of streaming as the company looks to build its streaming commerce business. 

Sriraman, previously head of Prime Video Channels at Amazon, joins Qurate Retail as it executes Project Athens, a three-year turnaround plan designed to stabilize its core businesses and expand the $8.3 billion in video-commerce revenue generated by its streaming operations.

The company also named Stacy Bowe chief merchandising officer, QVC U.S. Bowe held senior merchandising positions at G-III Apparel Group and Macy’s.

“These appointments reflect Qurate Retail Group’s ability to attract the most accomplished and ambitious executive talent in retail,” said Qurate Retail CEO David Rawlinson. “Our vCommerce teams — QVC, HSN and vCommerce Ventures — are disrupting video shopping and we believe we have a right to win in this growing industry. In addition, we are accelerating the pace of change within Qurate Retail Group through Project Athens, our turnaround plan, which touches nearly every facet of our business. We’re pleased to welcome Soumya and Stacy to our team.”

In her newly created post, Sriraman will head Qurate Retail's streaming commerce businesses including QVC Plus and HSN Plus, as well as the networks' presence on digital livestreaming TV.

Reporting to Mary Campbell, president of vCommerce Ventures at Qurate effective Wednesday, she is expected to expand the staff of the company's streaming unit, the company said.

Before Amazon, she was founding CEO of the BritBox SVOD service. Previously she held positions with BBC Studios, Tartan, Vivendi Universal, Warner Bros. and Universal Studios.

Bowe will oversee QVC's Buying, Planning & Programming organization and will lead QVC's Design Development & Global Sourcing unit, an in-house agency that brings new brands, products and concepts to life in apparel, accessories, outerwear and home décor

Effective Tuesday, Bowe reports to Mike Fitzharris, president of QVC U.S. ■

Cable legend John Malone, just days after converting his super-voting shares in Discovery Inc. to common stock for no premium to help facilitate its merger with WarnerMedia, has agreed to sell his Class B shares on TV and online retailer Qurate Retail Group to long-time lieutenant Greg Maffei, for about $400 million in cash or stock.

News of the filing first appeared in The Information. 

Qurate includes the two largest home shopping channels -- QVC and HSN -- as well as online retailer Zulily, Cornerstone Brands and green energy and other investments. .  

Malone, 80, helped found the modern cable business as chairman of Tele-Communications Inc., and has left his mark on practically every major cable deal in the past 20 years. He agreed on May 18 to sell his Qurate super-voting shares, which give him 41% voting rights in the company, to Maffei for $14 per share, according to Securities and Exchange Commission documents. Qurate stock currently trades around $13 per share. According to the filing, Malone would get paid in either cash, stock “or such other form of consideration as to which Mr. Maffei and Mr. Malone may mutually agree.”  

Maffei, who is CEO of Liberty Media and chairman of Qurate and several other Liberty holdings, joined Malone in 2005 after stints at Microsoft,  360Networks and Oracle. The two have been partners on several big deals, including the 2013 purchase of a 27% interest in Charter Communications. 

According to the SEC document, Malone agreed to the sale on May 18, pending board approvals. The document added that while he supports Qurate’s long-term strategy, he wanted to accept Maffei's offer “because it would provide flexibility for certain long-term estate and tax planning goals in light of potential changes in federal tax laws.”

The document continued that the sale is contingent on the approval of Qurate’s board of directors. Qurate also has call rights to Malone’s Class B shares, and if the company exercises that right, Malone said he would prefer to receive payment in the form of Qurate common stock, “such that he would continue to hold a substantial investment in Qurate Retail.”

Malone earlier agreed to convert his Class B super-voting shares in Discovery, which usually carry 10 votes each, on a 1:1 basis into common shares for no premium, a move that helped Discovery move forward with its planned merger with WarnerMedia. In a statement after that deal was announced, Malone said that he neither asked for nor received a premium for converting his Discovery stake. 

“I believe we are creating real value for shareholders and a legacy investment for my grandkids,” Malone said in the statement. 

Discovery’s super voting shares usually trade at around the same price of its common stock, but in the past several months, because of a sell-off by hedge fund Archegos Capital (which also shorted ViacomCBS stock), their value has soared. Bloomberg estimated that Discovery’s Class B shares have traded as high as $128 each at one point -- more than four times the Class A share price of around $32 per share. By converting his Class B shares on a one-for-one basis, Bloomberg estimated that Malone could lose about $280 million on the deal. 

That is in contrast to Discovery’s other major holder of super-voting shares -- Advance Publications, controlled by publishing giants the Newhouse family -- which according to Bloomberg will receive 13.1 shares of the new entity for every Class B share they own. Advance also will receive  the right to nominate two board members to the new entity.

Some analysts saw Malone’s Discovery deal as his way of helping to push the transaction forward. And he still will be a large shareholder after the deal closes, meaning he will participate in any upside in the stock price in the new entity. Some have predicted that the new Discovery-WarnerMedia could be valued at as much as $46 per share, well above the current $32 price of the stock on Thursday. 

In the race to pick the pandemic’s winners and losers, some executives argue that the deadly crisis could make home shopping and e-commerce a more important part of the TV industry.

In sharp contrast to the difficulties faced by traditional media businesses, which have been roiled by slumping ad revenue, layoffs and production shutdowns, government-mandated stay-at-home orders have boosted TV viewing, producing a marked rise in home shopping for products that consumers normally buy in shuttered brick-and-mortar retail outlets.

RELATED: Pandemic Changes the Home Shopping Mix

“The stay-at-home orders are producing a seismic shift in the way consumers shop,” said Brian Meehan, co-founder and chief operating officer of Knocking, a content creation and commerce company that works with media partners like Univision Communications, Cox Media Group and Sinclair Broadcast Group on their e-commerce efforts. “Every day is now Cyber Monday, and every day is bigger than the last.”

Meehan and others contend the crisis could prompt a wider shift towards e-commerce in the media sector. Knocking founder and CEO Markus Reinmund said a long-term decline in traditional linear TV advertising, accelerated by the pandemic, will push media companies to find better ways to monetize their content.

“In a short, two-month time frame, stay-at-home orders have really accelerated the long-term trend in consumer markets towards home shopping,” Reinmund said. “Consumers have more time to engage with media and TV viewing is up. But media companies are not profiting from this because they are seeing a dramatic decline in ad revenue. So, finding ways to be less dependent on ads and actually earn a share of the consumer spending is becoming a very attractive idea.”

Interest in that idea can be seen in efforts by Qurate Retail, NBCUniversal, Univision, ABC, Amazon Studios and Discovery, as well as major TV-station groups like Sinclair and Cox Media.

“The overall market for home shopping and selling direct to consumers is obviously something that will only continue to grow,” NBCUniversal executive VP, head of marketing and advertising creative Josh Feldman said.

Last year, Comcast-owned NBCU launched ShoppableTV, which encouraged consumers to use their smartphones to buy products while watching such programming as French Open tennis, the Tour de France cycling race, Songland and Very Cavallari simply by taking a photo of a code on the screen.

This June, NBCU will dive even deeper into e-commerce with the launch of the NBCUniversal Checkout commerce system, which will simplify the process of buying goods via ShoppableTV content and branded videos and web articles.

Clicking with Commerce

In the pandemic’s early days, though, much of the e-commerce growth has been gobbled up by the already dominant giant online retailers. Amazon, for example, reported $75.5 billion in net sales of goods and services in the first quarter of 2020, up 26% from a year earlier, with net sales from its online stores hitting $36.7 billion in Q1, up 24% from Q1 2019. The tech giant has forecasted an 18% to 28% jump in total net sales for Q2 of 2020.

How much of this growing market can be captured by TV companies is open to question, given that most of the industry has little experience with retail. It’s also unclear if the growth in e-commerce makes up for lost ad revenue from brick-and-mortar retailers that are in increasingly precarious financial straits. Retailers accounted for 14.5% of the TV ad spend in 2019, MediaRadar estimated.

A recent survey by Elevate at the media research and consulting firm SmithGeiger found 46% of Americans were spending more time shopping online. Half of the people sampled also said they spent more time watching TV for entertainment, and 41% noted that they were watching more local news.

“The shift in shopping patterns is here to stay,” noted Andrew Finlayson, executive VP of digital strategies at SmithGeiger, which does work for Knocking. That, in his view, opens up e-commerce opportunities for TV companies. “Consumers that were resistant and not shopping at home now have the full experience of doing it and in many cases might be continuing this behavior in the future.”

Another trend driving increased interest is the growing use of streaming platforms. In the first quarter, Roku had 39.8 million active accounts and time spent streaming as up 49% year over year, VP of content distribution Tedd Cittadine said.

“This is having a positive impact lifting the viewership for many of our channel partners, including the home-shopping channels that have seen, on average, double-digit increases in viewership time during the first three months of 2020,” he said.

Viewership gains are welcome news for traditional home-shopping channels, which have struggled in recent years because of larger industry-wide declines in pay TV subscriptions and linear TV viewing.

In 2019, Qurate Retail, which owns QVC and HSN, reported a 4% drop in sales to $13.46 billion.

iMediaBrands, the owner of ShopHQ and the Bulldog Shopping Network, saw even bigger declines, with net sales of $501.8 million for the fiscal year ending Feb. 1, 2020, down from $596.6 million in fiscal 2018.

Qurate Retail responded to the decline with a major expansion in digital operations. In August 2019, it launched a live streaming app with on-demand video and six channels on Roku and Amazon’s Fire TV. The Roku app now has more than 3 million installs, making it one of the platform’s top 25 free apps, said Todd Sprinkle, QVC’s senior VP of brand creative and production.

Qurate brands also have bolstered their presence on social-media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, with over 350 hours of content each week on Facebook Live; added linear streams on smart TV platforms like Samsung TV Plus and LG Channel Plus; and an expanded presence on local broadcast stations.

“Over the years, the model has evolved from linear TV into a multiplatform shopping experience that spans web, broadcast, mobile and social platforms,” QVC’s Sprinkle said. “We can reach a greater proportion of households today than we could 10 years ago,” even with multichannel cord-cutting.

Since the start of the pandemic, Sprinkle said, “we are seeing increased interest online in items that are helpful in the home,” with page views for a number of items increasing in March. Categories upwardly affected include food (up 66% from a year earlier on QVC and 48% on HSN.com), home-office gear (77% on QVC.com and 234% on HSN.com), wellness (up 143% on HSN.com) and health and fitness (up 126% on HSN.com).

Check It Out

These trends are occurring as a number of major programmers are rethinking their business models with new ad products and e-commerce applications.

Early efforts in that direction seem promising, with companies like Knocking, Univision and NBCU reporting successful e-commerce efforts.

“We’ve had an incredible response with the conversion rate of ShoppableTV being around 30% higher than the average e-commerce conversion rate,” NBCUniversal’s Feldman said.

Next month’s launch of NBCUniversal Checkout will further strengthen those efforts] by simplifying the creation of e-commerce offers and streamlining the consumer experience, Feldman said.

RELATED: Working for Pandemic Relief

Checkout is part of NBCU’s On Platform ad offering and its larger push into advanced advertising systems.

“Checkout can turn any branded video or web article into a native shoppable experience,” he said. “You can go to a video of a holiday gift buying guide and buy multiple brands in one checkout in the most frictionless way without the viewer ever leaving the environment they came for.”

A shift in viewing and consumer focus towards digital media and streaming should make such efforts even easier.

Univision, for example, currently has e-commerce offerings for national linear TV, local TV stations, online, social media and radio. “Being on multiple platforms was a key part of our strategy from the start,” Univision Local Media senior VP of growth initiatives John Buergler told Multichannel News.

In June of 2019, Univision partnered with Knocking to launch Gangas & Deals, a digital shopping market for Hispanics, with six- to eight-minute segments featuring upcoming brands on the morning show Despierta America. As part of the multiplatform efforts, Univision posts clickable materials on Instagram, where consumers can easily buy products.

Adding e-commerce options to the video on streaming platforms would be a logical next step that would greatly simplify the purchasing process, though Univision and most other media companies have not yet made that move.

Discovery’s Food Network Kitchen subscription video-on-demand service launched last October on Amazon’s Alexa, Fire TV and other platforms with features that would allow users in select markets to buy ingredients for some of its cooking show lessons.

And Amazon Prime Video’s original series Making the Cut with Heidi Klum and Tim Gunn, which premiered in March, allows viewers to purchase fashions featured in the competition show.

Data-Driven Dollars

Cittadine said Roku’s connected-TV platform already has a number of attractive features for e-commerce. The Roku Pay setup, used to buy app subscriptions on the platform, can streamline the checkout process, and Roku’s extensive data collection and analytics efforts could help companies promote their products, create targeted ads and develop more compelling e-commerce strategies.

“We’re still in the early days of shopping on streaming services,” Cittadine said. “But you can imagine the opportunities this creates when you can target the right consumer who is looking for a product with embedded purchasing power and interactivity.”

That makes improved data and measurement of audience engagement one of the key opportunities surrounding e-commerce efforts.

Last fall, Knocking began testing short, one-to-three-minute “Local Steals & Deals” segments that could be placed in local newscasts. In March, it fully launched the product, which now airs on stations owned by TV groups including Cox Media and Sinclair.

The exact format is up to the stations. Typically, a local anchor or personality will introduce the segment, which is produced by Knocking and hosted by former QVC personality Lisa Robertson. Local Steals & Deals features upcoming brands selected by Knocking and is typically part of the newscast or show, rather than an ad.

The segments are crafted as editorial content, with brands that have compelling stories about the entrepreneur behind the companies or the causes they support, rather than straight product pitches, Knocking executives said. As editorial content, they also don’t have to take away from ad time and have the long-term benefit of providing valuable data about the consumers.

“It is a fundamental shift in the business model for media,” Knocking’s Reinmund said. “Instead of just exposing them to an ad, I can go way beyond that. I’ll have actionable deep-engagement data and I can build a relationship with a consumer that will be much deeper and more valuable.”  

The pandemic has prompted a rise in the number of people buying products from home, but for top shopping channels like QVC and HSN, the increase in interest was a mixed blessing as customers shifted from buying high-margin offerings like fashion and jewelry to less-profitable home categories.

QVC and HSN parent Qurate Retail Group, which also includes online retailer Zulily, saw revenue in the first quarter dip about 5%, to $2.9 billion. Operating income fell 20% as the shift to low-margin offerings and an increase in costs associated with its fulfillment centers and employees during the pandemic ate into profits.

About 10,000 Qurate employees are now working from home and the company has spent about $19 million in emergency pay and benefits for its workers. Qurate has committed about $10 million to support urgent needs in its communities, including donating airtime for public-service announcements, participating in the Small Business Spotlight initiative with the National Retail Federation; a global PPE-creation project funding artisans globally with female-founded nonprofit group Nest; and relief programs like Meals on Wheels and No Kid Hungry.

Qurate president and CEO Mike George said sales began to rebound late in March and have continued into April. Qurate’s online businesses had strong showings in the quarter, with traffic on the QVC website up about 30% compared to the prior year and live streaming over social media rising 100%. Home viewership at the QVC and HSN channels was up 10% in the period.

On a conference call with analysts, George said though it is still early in the second quarter, the April growth is consistent and evident across several product segments.

“We’ve seen it across new customers, reactivated customers, occasional customers and core customers,” George said. “We’ve seen it across a range of home categories, electronic categories, beauty categories. The only place we’re not seeing it is in apparel, accessories and jewelry. So I’d characterize it as consistent, broad-based sales growth.”

The shift wasn’t exactly an accident, George added. Qurate foresaw the changes in buying habits associated with the pandemic, and tailored its message and offerings to meet them.

Tailored to the Times

Qurate blew up most of its on-air
programming calendar, inventing new programs that would address the moment, like Love Your Home, a home-products show that replaced Beauty iQ, and airing afternoon miniseries to take advantage of an increase in viewership during that time slot.

QVC, HSN and Zulily also beefed up their home-products inventories to focus on new trending categories like home, sanitation, food and storage, business tools, tech resources for distance learning and
beautification. The company also leaned
into its social media platform, including the #PostAtHome campaign on QVC, which featured hosts live streaming from their homes, and Cornerstone Brands’ Grandin Roads #MakeYourDoorHappy, encouraging viewers to share their front door decorations on social media.

QVC and HSN saw increases in home-fitness products — sales of bikes, treadmills and ellipticals were all up — as well as vitamin supplements and home-office products like laptops, tablets, printers and monitors. Viewers also were interested in boosting connectivity with family and friends as shelter-in-place orders continued, leading to increased sales of video-calling devices like Amazon’s Echo Show and Facebook Portal.

Qurate said about two-thirds of
new customers in the quarter came in organically, reflecting the power of its brands. Now, George said, Qurate will step up marketing spending to attract and retain new customers.

“We’ve seen improved efficiency across all marketing channels, including paid social, which gives us a powerful platform to highlight our unique shopping experience and are moving quickly to convert new customers into lifetime customers with campaigns that build relationships by focusing on what makes us unique and targeted emails, digital nurturing through retargeting and the piloting of additional social channels and ad formats,” George said on the call.

Lower Margins, Higher Costs

Evercore ISI analyst Oliver Wintermantel wrote in a research note that while the April sales growth is encouraging — he revised his Q2 revenue estimates upward to a 1% decline — the mix in products to some lower-profit merchandise comes at a time of additional operating costs related to the pandemic. Wintermantel expects EBITDA margins to fall another 100 to 150 basis points in Q2.

“Consumers adapted to the new stay-at-home mandates and the company adjusted its merchandising, programming and marketing to better meet the needs of its customers,” Wintermantel wrote. “That said, the product margin pressure due to category mix shifts continued and [Qurate] is incurring further COVID-related costs — including additional pay, reduced productivity in its fulfillment centers, which is leading to increased fulfillment times and additional bad debt reserves (in anticipation of the deteriorating economic situation).” 

QVC and HSN announced their plan to showcase more than 70 entrepreneurial brands on their platform by the end of 2020.

“The Big Find” is a nationwide search for up and coming brands in beauty, accessories and fashion. More than 38 have already been seen on HSN and QVC such as Act and Acre, Valencia Key Jewelry and Have Some Fun Today.

QVC and HSN have launched some of the most successful entrepreneurial brands such as IT Cosmetics, TATCHA, Junior's Cheesecakes and more, said Mary Campbell, chief merchandising officer, Qurate Retail Group, and chief commerce officer, QVC US.

The search for entrepreneurial brands attracted 650 entries around the world when it launched in June 2019. In August, 270 semi-finalists met at day long pitching sessions in Florida, Pennsylvania, New York and Seattle. 

HSN Inc. shareholders will gather Dec. 29 at the home shopping giant’s St. Petersburg, Fla., headquarters for a special meeting to approve its $2.6 billion merger with QVC Inc. parent Liberty Interactive, the company said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission Monday.

Liberty first announced the all-stock deal in July, where Liberty Interactive would acquire the 62% of HSN it doesn’t already own. The company plans to keep its HSN and QVC brands separate.

The deal is still subject to federal regulatory approvals. Liberty has said it expects the transaction to be completed by the end of the year.

According to the deal each HSN stockholder will receive 1.65 shares of Liberty Interactive's Series A QVC Group common stock for each share of HSN common stock they own.

According to the prospectus, Liberty Interactive will issue about 53.5 million shares of Liberty QVCA common stock to HSN shareholders, who would own about 11.1% of the equity and 7.2% of the voting power of Liberty Interactive's QVC Group tracking stock. Additionally, HSN shareholders would own about 6.2% of the Liberty Interactive voting power as a whole.

Layer3 TV, the Denver-based MVPD, has launched Shop by Remote, an interactive TV app from HSN.

They said the new capability lets Layer3 TV customers browse for and buy HSN products with the remote control. Those customers can choose size, color and quantity from more than 40,000 items that’s available on the app.

Layer3 TV customers can pay by remote using the credit card they have on file with their HSN account. Layer3 TV has more detail about that app posted here. 

Per HSN’s web site, several other MVPDs and co-ops support HSN’s Shop by Remote app, including AT&T/U-verse, Blue Ridge Communications, Comcast, Optimum (Altice USA), Hawaiian Telecom, Verizon, and the Palmetto Rural Telephone Cooperative, among others.

Layer3 TV said the Shop by Remote app joins other apps that have been integrated on its set-top box platform, including Xumo, iHeartRadio, Pandora and YouTube.

RELATED: Layer3 TV Expands OTT Slate With Xumo

Layer3 TV is available in Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington D.C., Dallas/Ft. Worth, and Denver (Longmont), and has plans to launch in New York. It has not announced subscriber numbers. 

Long before Amazon and Alibaba, there were home shopping channels on television.

Today, in the modern age of digital commerce, those “home shopping” channels are hoping that a steady video stream of celebrity endorsers and effervescent hosts will save — and even grow — their niche in retail TV and online retailing.

While Amazon gobbles market share from online and big-box retailers of every shape and size, TV home-shopping channels have managed to maintain their hold on a multibillion-dollar share of the business, in part with new technology and digital strategies.

Related: Next-Generation TV Expected To Usher in New Era of T-Commerce

Last month, the industry got a bit of a boost with the pending merger of its two largest companies, QVC and HSN. That deal, expected to close in the fourth quarter, is either a testament to the power of TV home shopping or an attempt to buy a little more time for a struggling sector.

On the surface, the QVC and HSN deal, valued at about $2.6 billion, does a little of both. The combination would create a potential powerhouse with $14 billion in annual sales and annual cost savings of $75 million to $110 million per year. It will also pair the two giants in the space, with diverse product lines: QVC has focused on home and accessories products, while HSN has concentrated on young women’s fashions.

QVC is in more TV homes — 104 million versus HSN’s 84 million — but HSN has a stronger online and mobile presence. Forty-three percent of HSN’s $2 billion in online sales are mobile.

Bulking Up Against Amazon
The added heft could help insulate the companies from the looming threat of online retail behemoth Amazon, which is expected to report online retail sales of more than $107 billion this year.

“Everybody’s always worried about Amazon, just because of how big it’s gotten and generational shifts,” FBN Securities managing director, cable media and entertainment equity research Robert Routh said in an interview. “People in my generation may or may not have wives or girlfriends that watch QVC, while millennials, they don’t even watch television.”

The biggest question is whether companies still involved in the sector have enough exclusive products, personalities and other assets that will overshadow any losses on the TV side, Routh added. “At some point it could face material issues to its core viewership unless it can find a way to adapt,” he said. “But so far it has.”

While TV shopping may have passed its heyday — sales for both QVC and HSN have dipped over the past year — companies in the sector see video as one of the differentiating factors that won’t just keep TV shopping alive, but help it thrive.

“If anyone says they’re not concerned about Amazon, then they don’t have their eyes wide open,” Jewelry TV chief strategy officer Tim Engle said in an interview.

Engle said while the deal could affect other retailers that offer similar products, Jewelry TV made the decision in the early 2000s to focus exclusively on one product — jewelry.

“We feel like that niche and that focus really positions us well and defines who we are,” Engle said. “I’m not like the No. 3 person trying to compete with these two mega-giants. I’m the No. 1 person in my space.”

QVC and HSN have also made changes over the years, switching their product focus from electronics and watches several years ago to a concentration on home products for QVC and women’s fashions for HSN.

Both channels have a steady stream of celebrity endorsed offerings, from Lisa Rinna and Isaac Mizrahi fashions at QVC to Diane Gilman jeans and Keith Urban guitars at HSN.

And both have plunged headfirst into the information age with mobile and e-commerce capabilities. At QVC, e-commerce accounted for $4 billion of global revenue in 2016 and represented 9% of consolidated global revenues and 55% of U.S. revenues in the second quarter, with mobile making up 63% of global e-commerce orders and 62% of U.S. e-commerce orders.

According to HSN, about 43% of its $2 billion in annual digital sales are from mobile.

Both QVC and HSN have a strong presence on TV. QVC’s three pay TV channels are in 104 million homes and HSN’s two channels are in 91 million households. Both brands have a strong relationship with major cable operators such as Comcast, Charter Communications and Cox Communications, as well as with smaller systems throughout the country.

Both channels also have been active adopters of new technologies. HSN is available on Roku, Apple TV, Android TV, You Tube, Smart TVs and Amazon Fire TV, while QVC is on Facebook Live, Apple TV, YouTube and Roku.

While QVC and HSN grab most of the TV home-shopping headlines, smaller outlets such as Evine Live (formerly ShopHQ), Jewelry TV, Shop LC, America’s Auction Network, Gem Shopping Network and others have managed to weather the changes as the business has evolved.

Rolling With the Changes
Some have managed the changes better than others.

Privately held Jewelry TV has had double-digit sales growth in the past two years; it grew by 14% in 2016 and by 15.7% in 2015, far outpacing overall retail industry growth rates of about 3.4%, according to the National Retail Federation.

Compared to Amazon, Jewelry TV and TV home shopping in general is tiny. But Engle sees that as an advantage, too.

“People still want some humanity in their retail,” Engle said. “I think there is a place for Amazon, I think there is a place for Macy’s, I think there is a place for all the retailers, but I also think there is a viable place for selling on video. Video is where the industry is moving anyway; we’ve just been doing it for 25 years.”

While every shopping channel has an eye on Amazon, Routh of FBN Securities said, there is room for the e-retailer and the channels to survive. “There is still a huge percentage of the population that stays at home and tends to watch channels like QVC and HSN as they’re doing other things,” Routh said.

Amazon made its name in books, movies and music, but has been steadily encroaching on other industries as it strives to dominate the retail sector. Last year, it became the largest online seller of clothing, racking up $16.3 billion in apparel sales in 2015, according to Internet Retailer. And the online giant is closing the gap between itself and big-box retailers like Walmart, with $24 billion of total sales in 2015, and Macy’s, with $21 billion, Internet Retailer reported.

Amazon has reportedly investigated launching its own shopping channel, a “QVC Killer,” according to tech site Geek Wire, which would allow purchases right from the screen. Amazon already has incorporated e-commerce features to its Amazon Fire Stick, allowing customers to purchase some items. And HSN signed a deal in 2016 to incorporate its Shop By Remote app on the Fire Stick and the app also is available on Android TV.

“We bring an experiential aspect and an engaging aspect, where I can sell a chrome dioxide ring and explain why chrome is so unique, what’s the story behind chrome, where in Russia is it mined, why is it so unique and why it is better to buy this than maybe an emerald,” Engle said. “You can’t get that behind the counter at a Zales or a Macy’s and you certainly are never going to get it from Amazon. That’s not where Amazon plays.”

Still, there’s little dispute that the TV home-shopping business is under pressure. QVC, long the sector’s undisputed king, saw its U.S. revenue dip 3.2% in 2016 to $6.3 billion, while overall sales stayed flat at $8.7 billion. In the second quarter, sales fell 4% to $1.97 billion from $2.1 billion in the previous year.

“It is a tough environment; we’re not here to suggest that the environment is going to suddenly get easier,” QVC CEO Mike George said on a July conference call announcing the deal. “And so, certainly the sales headwinds are a reality for retailers.”

At HSN, net sales fell 2.7% in 2016 to $3.6 billion, and the slide continued in the first half of 2017, with overall revenue declining 5.9% to $1.6 billion.

“[I]t has been a tough period; we’re not happy with the performance,” HSN CEO Rod Little said on the July call. “It’s part of why we’re here today, I guess.”

HSN expects the market to begin turning around in the second quarter, when efforts to cut costs and the divestiture of some smaller apparel lines kicks in.

“And then it’s all about leveraging the capabilities; digital, social, some of the platform e-commerce elements that QVC has and taking the best of both mindsets, what they’re good at, what we’re good at, and getting after some of those very quickly,” Little said.

Home shopping networks have largely stayed out of the battles between pay TV programmers and distributors for good reason. The channels are offered for free and distributors also get a cut of sales generated in their markets. At HSN, that has meant that pay TV providers have received a 10% slice of their nearly $4 billion in annual sales, while QVC shares up to 5% of its $6.5 billion in U.S. revenue. Those percentages will be modified after the deal closes in the fourth quarter, but isn’t expected to be a dramatic reduction in the overall pie.

Some operators have said the deal will force a re-evaluation of the QVC and HSN networks, which include QVC2, Beauty iQ and HSN2, in addition to the main QVC and HSN channels.

“They do pay us, but it’s not a huge amount of money,” said one midsize distributor who asked not to be named, adding that the merger could be an opportunity to reduce the number of QVC-HSN channels carried, which could then be used for broadband or for other content.

“Their second and third channels really don’t have the same value,” the midsize distributor said. “[The merger] makes it a little easier to push back.”

George, who will manage both companies when the deal is closed, said on the conference call that he understands that the combined companies’ five channels have varying degrees of distributor interest, with different channel positions, carriage structures and even some still broadcasting in standard definition.

“We’ve always believed in that, as a core principle at QVC, that our distributors should win when we’re winning,” George said on the call. “And so, we want to engage with them on what would that look like and what would make sense for all parties.”

Kellie Pickler is looking at a busy couple of months. Season three of the country music artist’s unscripted series I Love Kellie Pickler debuts on CMT Aug. 3, and her syndicated talk show, Pickler & Ben, an E.W. Scripps Co. creation shot in front of a Nashville studio audience, debuts Sept. 18.

Pickler promised a lot of laughs in the new season of I Love Kellie Pickler. She called it a “feel-good show” but one that also spotlights things she holds dear, such as the military. Pickler recently concluded a USO tour in Iraq, her 11th with the organization.

“We’ll shine a light on things we feel passionate about,” Pickler told The Wire.

The new season, she said, offers both a North Carolina episode — her old friend Jenny joins her and husband Kyle Jacobs there — and a Minnesota one, with a friend of Kyle’s from back home visiting. They’ll also venture to Alaska. Pickler said the state has long been on her bucket list. She and Kyle try dog-sledding there. “We’re adventure chasers and adrenaline junkies,” she said.

Pickler was on the fifth season of American Idol in 2006, making it to the final six. She’s pumped for the new Idol on ABC. “I’m excited to see how they reinvent it and find new ways to make it more interesting,” she said.

Pickler & Ben is executive produced by Faith Hill. Besides cooking and home-design segments, Pickler said she and journalist Ben Aaron will “shine a light on small businesses,” with one or two featured in each episode. HSN is a partner on the show.

“We’ll support the locals and put the focus back on them,” she said. “The whole show will be shoppable.”

It’s a hectic time, but Pickler said that’s how she prefers it. “It’s a good problem to have,” she said. “I don’t do well being still for too long.”

Over the past few years, digital technology has profoundly changed the home-shopping business, which not only appears to be surviving but, in many ways, is thriving despite radical changes in consumer-buying habits.

QVC, HSN and Evine Live have embraced e-commerce, with sales from digital platforms soaring to roughly half of their revenue. In fact, QVC and HSN ranked Nos. 8 and 19, respectively, this year in a list of the Top 25 e-commerce retailers compiled by eMarketer. And now, the products borne from the digital revolution — consumer electronics ranging from laptops to Fitbits — have supplanted jewelry as a key home-shopping product category.

As it turned out, the Internet didn’t kill home shopping. Instead, the major home-shopping channels stepped up to the plate with their websites and mobile apps; adjusted their mixes of merchandise to reflect the times; repurposed their TV content and created original programming for their digital platforms; and made aggressive, innovative forays into social media.

For the remainder of the year and going forward, executives at QVC, HSN and Evine said they will continue to make changes and find new ways to make buying on digital platforms more enticing and easy.

HSN, for example, will once again live-stream a fashion show featuring apparel from its celebrity vendor Serena Williams, with that event to take place later this month.

“Everything in the fashion show will be shoppable in the moment,” HSN president Bill Brand said.

QVC’s efforts have included launching an all-digital network — Beauty IQ, available on QVC.com — and experimenting with Facebook Live. And Evine is focusing on making its online checkout process as consumer-friendly as possible, as well as following the example of its two larger competitors by finding success with celebrity vendors, including Southern chef Paula Deen and actress-singer Vanessa Williams.

QVC, HSN and Evine say that these kinds of initiatives, as well as their ability to be nimble to adjust to consumer trends, have given them an advantage in a brutal retail environment. It’s a landscape in which brick-and-mortar companies are announcing store closings or filing for Chapter 11 protection, and one where Amazon.com appears to have changed shopping habits forever. QVC, HSN and Evine Live maintain the relationships they’ve forged with their longtime customers — who unabashedly enjoy shopping — through the networks’ vendors and hosts will also help them weather the storm.

“We were always part of a shopping experience that was best had outside of the traditional brick-and-mortar environment,” Doug Rose, QVC senior vice president of brand and communications, said.

And now those “super-engaged consumers” can shop online — on a desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone — for any product 24/7, according to Brand.

That is not to say that home-shopping networks haven’t been buffeted by the changing retail climate. In the second quarter, QVC’s domestic network saw revenue increase 2% to $1.4 billion, but CEO Mike George warned that sales had tailed off the end of the quarter. HSN’s net sales slipped 3% from the prior year to $557.2 million, and Evine Live saw a similar dip, down 2% to $157 million.

But home-shopping network officials said their companies are better equipped to buck the negative trends in part by swiftly adjusting their on-air and digital offerings in a way that, in their view, traditional retailers cannot.

“We are so flexible we can go where the customers are taking us,” Rose said. “You’ll see us shifting airtime and resources and digital space to categories that are really responding and we’ll shift them away from ones that are not doing as well.”

DIGITAL REVOLUTION

In the second quarter, QVC’s digital sales increased to 51% of revenue, to $727 million, with mobile making up 57% of that, according to QVC’s parent, Liberty Interactive.

“People who like shopping for discovery like to fit it into the margins of their day, and so, when they’re grabbing a cup of coffee in line in Starbucks, they’re going to open up their app and they’re going to see what’s on QVC today,” Rose said.

Home-shopping networks were well-positioned to take advantage of the e-commerce boom. Digital made it easy for shoppers to buy merchandise from the networks’ vast inventories of product, even when it wasn’t being shown on-air. And QVC, HSN and Evine also had distribution systems in place to get goods directly to consumers.

In addition, the networks could post video from their telecasts online with products.

“Most brick-and-mortar retailers don’t have the internal structure to do all this kind of production,” Nicole Ostoya, Evine’s chief marketing officer, said. “It takes years producing 24/7. We’re making content and it’s taken all of these years to hone this skill.”

Officials at all three of the major home shopping networks say that their strategy is to tell viewers the interesting stories behind the brands and products they sell, and the people behind them, and video lets them do that online.

Today, these networks say that they are continuing to fine-tune their online experience for shoppers.

While some retailers viewed e-commerce and mobile “as something of a disruptive factor, we look at [them] as a unique opportunity,” Rose said.

Digital sales are also skyrocketing at HSN, making up 46-47% of its business, according to Brand. He said that his network’s most valuable customers shop across all of its platforms.

“I’ve had to really pivot this business to be sure that we’re building an experience that’s based in content but is seamless and frictionless across every single device,” he said. “The iPhone only came out in ’07 … and now smartphones and tablets make up 50% of all of our digital sales.”

On the mobile front, the focus at HSN is “on optimization,” making that experience as strong and consumer-friendly as possible, Brand said. And as a result of growing demand on digital, HSN has widened it online product assortment, particularly in the beauty category, according to Brand, “because our customers want great product when they want it, and that’s what digital provides.”

The third-largest home shopping network is officially named Evine Live, but on-air it has dropped the “Live” and refers to itself as just “Evine” because of its digital presence, Ostoya said.

“We think that Evine is cleaner and easier to understand,” she said. “A lot of places that people experience us — online, on our app — the content isn’t live, so it felt like [Evine Live] wasn’t exactly right.”

In the second quarter, the company reported about half of its sales are online, and 50% of those are actually done by mobile, Ostoya said.

“But a big piece of that is driven by what’s on-air,” she said. “What we’re finding is a lot of customers still see what we’re selling on the TV but instead of calling, they do the quick checkout on their second screen … So we have a really nice healthy online business, but there is that chunk that’s driven by what’s on TV.”

Like its larger competitors, Evine has been tweaking the content it offers online, and has new initiatives in the works for unique online content, according to Ostoya.

“In the old home-shopping/online world, we would just take our shows and repurpose them on the Web,” she said.

Now Evine is editing down 10-minute segments to two minutes for the Web, to make it more convenient for consumers, Ostoya said.

Evine is also working to ease the process for checking out and purchasing items online, and plans a total overhaul of its website next year under the guidance of its newly named chief digital officer, Macy’s veteran Sunil Verma, Ostoya said.

THE AMAZING GORILLA

E-commerce giant Amazon has been a disrupter, luring shoppers away from brickand- mortar retailers. This year, it also escalated efforts to sell apparel — a key category for home shopping — launching a live show called Style Code Live featuring clothes available on Amazon.

Rose and Brand said that while their home-shopping customers buy some goods on Amazon, the monster website doesn’t have the allure and attributes that attract many shoppers to HSN and QVC. Amazon’s emergence more than 20 years ago “has been wind on our back,” Rose said, “because for that entire time what it, in effect, did was help bring more and more people into the behavior of shopping remotely.”

But Amazon really just represents “a search-driven experience if you know what looking for and you are just trying to avoid running an errand,” according to Rose.

“Amazon is kind of the elephant in the room in retail right now,” HSN’s Brand said. “And they’re doing an amazing job of delivering product purely from a commodity standpoint ... Our point of differentiation comes through products you can’t find anywhere else, the content and the personalities [on the network], and the relationships.”

Some 75% of the merchandise HSN sells can’t be bought elsewhere, and popular vendors such as celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck and veteran host Colleen Lopez have loyal followings, according to Brand.

“Those relationships even in the toughest retail environment help us pull through,” he said, adding that shoppers don’t have a relationship with a search engine.

Ostoya described Amazon as “an incredible force in the marketplace” that is affecting everyone.

“Where we stand apart is Amazon is still a 2D experience: you can click on it, you can zoom in,” she said. “I know that they started Style Code, but they don’t quite understand the science that we understand about home shopping … They don’t understand that you have to get the information out clearly [about merchandise] right away ... They’re doing kind of a talk show. That’s not commerce shopping.”

SHAKING UP THE MIX

It’s an outdated notion that QVC and HSN are largely purveyors of cubic zirconia jewelry. With the explosion of consumer-electronics products, driven in good part by the Internet, QVC and HSN have diversified far beyond from jewelry sales in recent years and shifted their product mixes to include consumer electronics as common as tablets to newer wares just coming to market.

“We had great success with Amazon and its Echo device,” Rose said. “Those kinds of emerging technologies are very demonstrable and that’s kind of our sweet spot … Products that we are constantly looking for are those that have great stories to tell, and they might actually struggle a bit in the absence of telling that story.”

QVC also believes its growing international footprint gave it an advantage in the retail and home-shopping arena for consumer electronics and other categories. That reach allowed it to afford brands such as Dyson virtually global distribution through its home-shopping channels in Europe and the Far East, Rose said.

Consumer electronics “continues to be a strong pillar” of HSN’s strategy, and the network has built strong relationships with companies such as HP and Samsung, according to Brand. The network also is partnering with exercise-electronics maker Fitbit on offerings.

HSN has become such a player in the consumer-electronics arena that the industry turns to the electronic retailer for marketing advice, according to Brand.

“And the reason that the consumer-electronics business relies on us the way that they do is because of the understanding that we have of the female consumer,” he said. “It’s fascinating to go to [International] CES with our team and they rely on us to help them pick colors in laptops. Technology … is a big part of our business, but it’s also how women interact on social [media] and shop now.”

In contrast to QVC and HSN, Evine’s major product category remains jewelry and watches, Ostoya said. While the network has diversified its merchandise mix, it pulled back on the consumer-electronics segment last quarter and is retooling efforts “because we weren’t doing it well,” Ostoya said.

There’s a lot of potential in electronics because Evine hosts and expert vendors can explain all the benefits and features of a product on-air more skillfully than an untrained teen salesperson at Best Buy, she said.

Sports analyst/correspondent Mary Carillo will host the 2016 Women in Cable & Telecommunications (WICT) Signature Luncheon in conjunction with NCTA's INTX Convention in Boston May 16.

That is the luncheon where WICT honors its 2015 PAR Best Companies for Women in Cable.

This year's PAR honorees in the operator category are Cox Communications, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Bright House networks and Atlantic Broadband. Programmers are Discovery, Disney, NBCU, Turner and HSN.

Carillo is a correspondent for NBC Sports and NBC's Olympics team, as well as HBO's Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel and The Tennis Channel.

HSN’s Shop By Remote app will become the first interactive shopping network app to appear on Amazon Fire TV devices in the U.S.

The app allows users to buy more than 50,000 products and watch live HSN programming and on-demand product demonstrations.

“We are pleased to add Amazon Fire TV to the roster of partners offering HSN’s Shop By Remote app,” said Peter Ruben, executive VP, affiliate relations for HSN. “This is an important step in our effort to advance the practice of ‘boundary-less retail’ whereby consumers can watch HSN programming and shop.”

The HSN app is also available on Apple TV, Roku, TiVo, Google Play, Comcast Optimum, FiOS, Verizon and other platforms.

Read more at B&C. 

In their quest to find new products, develop more engaging content and attract new viewers, home-shopping networks have turned to a now-familiar programming genre: reality competition.

QVC, HSN and Evine Live have forged alliances with three of the stars of ABC’s primetime hit Shark Tank in order to create their own on-air competition “programs” or segments, as well as to source merchandise.

Last month, HSN unveiled its “American Dreams” initiative, which will feature Shark Tank’s Daymond John as part of a team searching for entrepreneurs with good ideas and products for the network.

Lori Greiner, a Shark Tank “shark” and veteran QVC vendor, became a financial backer for Scrub Daddy, a smiley-faced sponge that gained sales traction on the home-shopping channel. Last year, it was named Shark Tank’s most successful product.

And earlier this year, billionaire Shark Tank shark Mark Cuban hosted a series, Mark Cuban’s American Dream, on Evine Live where he showcased inventors whose companies he had invested in. The home-shopping network calls it “retail reality.”

Jewelry Television has gone all in on the trend, claiming to be the first shopping network to broadcast a full-fledged reality show, JTV Rock Star Designer. That half-hour program, chronicling the network’s national talent search for jewelry designers, airs on Fridays at 7:30 p.m. JTV is considering shopping around a second season of the show to a traditional cable network.

Home-shopping networks have good reason to piggyback on the popularity of reality-competition shows. As both the retail and television environments have grown increasingly competitive, home-shopping networks have been upgrading their programming — to make it about storytelling and entertainment — and reality competitions can add those elements.

BREAKING THROUGH

“What has appealed to us about this whole genre of reality competitions is that it’s in line with our overall brand marketing strategy, which is to look for disruptive, high-engagement opportunities to break through clutter,” Doug Rose, QVC’s senior vice president of brand and communications, said.

Home-shopping networks also want to broaden their audience, to reach those who may watch Shark Tank but never tune into “The Q.” And the home-shopping outlets are always looking for the next big product, and Shark Tank can scout for such wares.

HSN president Bill Brand emphasized the importance of expanding his network’s viewership through its “American Dreams” undertaking.

“Wherever those eyes and ears are, I want to build awareness, and ultimately it’s about acquisition,” he said. “I want to acquire new customers who never considered HSN, but now that we’re doing something like ‘American Dreams’ … maybe they’ll shop here.”

Seeing a QVC vendor such as Greiner on Shark Tank lets new audiences view the network as a TV venue with “really appealing personalities and great stories” behind its products rather than “just a parade of items,” Rose said.

HSN is in the midst of its “American Dreams” initiative, where it has enlisted five entrepreneurs, including John, the founder, president and CEO of apparel label FUBU, through Shark Tank, to search the nation using TV, radio, conferences and trade shows to discover new product ideas.

The others participating in the search are: Marc Portney, through investing in entrepreneurs on Science Channel’s series All-American Makers; Bob Circosta, through HSN’s revamped “American Dreams Ideas Portal,” convention searches and seminars; Akos Jankura, through the “My Cool Inventions” radio talent search; and Gregg Smith through Edison Nation, which operates a marketplace for independent inventors.

Once a month, HSN’s The Monday Night Show With Adam Freeman will dedicate its first hour to showcasing three or more entrepreneurs with their new products along with the entrepreneur who found them — be it John or one of the other four.

Brand maintained that reality-competition shows have actually taken a page from HSN’s playbook in terms of hunting for blockbuster products, citing inventor Joy Mangano and her Huggable Hanger line.

“It’s the idea of Joy Mangano on Long Island creating a hanger and now almost 700 million being sold: That’s competition,” Brand said. “And if you think about the number of entrepreneurs, the number of new ideas, the number of product ideas that come through the HSN pipeline at any given time, it’s competitive … Who’s going to get their shot at going into 96 million homes?”

HSN already had a relationship with John, who reached out to Brand about two years ago.

BULDING ON RELATIONSHIPS

“He was talking about being on Shark Tank and having these product ideas and he said, ‘Bill, do I have permission to talk about HSN on Shark Tank? And I said, ‘Do you have to ask me?’ ” Brand said.

John has been selling items from his own mobile-phone accessory line, Moguls Mobile, on HSN, and enjoys appearing om the home-shopping network, Brand said. In advance of “American Dreams,” John introduced three entrepreneurs and products from Shark Tank on HSN in July.

Products that John brings from Shark Tank will have added credibility because HSN viewers are engaged in pop culture and familiar with the ABC show, according to Brand.

Dominant home-shopping network QVC, owned by Liberty Interactive, has been particularly aggressive in the reality-competition space, capitalizing on the relationships some of its major vendors have had with such programming. Greiner had been inventing and selling products on QVC for years before she was chosen as part of the Shark Tank panel.

“Lori has been a breakout star for them and clearly has helped elevate awareness of QVC among that audience,” Rose said. “So we’re really grateful to be sort of riding on her coattails on that one.”

Inventor Aaron Krause had appeared on QVC early in the development of Scrub Daddy, Rose said. Greiner became an investor when Krause made his pitch on Shark Tank, and Scrub Daddy roared back to QVC with great success, jump-starting its sales push.

For two seasons, QVC collaborated with Lifetime’s Project Runway All Stars, partnering with the show where designer Isaac Mizrahi — who does collections for the home-shopping network — was a judge.

“We approached it with the expectation that there were a lot of people that watched that show and had come to really like Isaac and appreciate him and understand his esthetic, and had no idea that he had this huge business at QVC,” Rose said. “So why don’t we just remind folks engaged in that show that you can find Isaac’s complete line at QVC?”

Project Runway: All Stars incorporated fashion accessories from QVC on the show and used one of the shopping network’s then-hosts, Lisa Robertson, as a guest judge. Winners from two seasons created capsule fashion lines for QVC, with Seth Aaron Henderson’s “SA by Seth” still sold on the home-shopping network.

And once again, through an association with one of its vendors, QVC currently is participating in an initiative with Today. Jill Martin, a contributor on the NBC morning show, is also the creative director for QVC’s G.I.L.I. fashion line. The Peacock Network is staging a “Today’s Next Big Thing” competition, and recently finished accepting product submissions.

The finalists will make their pitches on Today this month, and the winner will appear with Martin on QVC.

TOO BIG FOR YOUTUBE

JTV, which sells jewelry and gemstones 24/7, turned to reality competition with its Rock Star Designer show to create more brand awareness, drive viewers to the channel and ultimately, increase sales, vice president of marketing Jill Johnson said. The program features five finalists from a competition that JTV held earlier this year, and one of the judges is Michael O’Connor, a celebrity stylist who was a fixture on QVC for many years. The program is a full-scale TV production with original sets, wardrobe and crew.

Rock Star Designer was initially planned as an offering for YouTube, where JTV is trying to beef up its presence, Tim Engle, the network’s chief strategy officer, said.

“But when we started to see the postproduction output, I felt like it was just way too good to relegate it to YouTube alone,” Engle said. “I felt our viewers would appreciate it as well.”

JTV president and CEO Tim Matthews agreed, and wanted the show to air in primetime on Friday nights, as a lead-in to one of the network’s most popular segments, “Girlfriend Friday,” Engle said. The show’s episodes are also available on YouTube and on JTV’s website.

Since the debut of Rock Star Designer, JTV’s YouTube viewership has doubled “every single week,” Engle said. And viewership on the TV show, as tracked by Rentrak, has been increasing, he said.

On a recent Friday night in August, sales on “Girlfriend Friday” appeared to get a big boost from its Rock Star Designer lead-in, Engle said.

“I would have to say was probably our largest sales for that slot in recent memory,” Engle said. “Even during the holidays I don’t remember it being that successful … We must have had really good viewership coming into that hour.”

JTV is running seven episodes of Rock Star Designer, ending Sept. 18. The winner will receive a $5,000 cash prize and get to design and sell a jewelry line on the network.

JTV has several options going forward, Engle said. It could do a second season of Rock Star Designer and only put it on YouTube. It could renew it to run on the home-shopping channel. Or it could try to take the show to a traditional cable network, perhaps a Lifetime or DIY, Engle said.

“The pitch we could make is that we would basically be co-branding or co-producing with a production company, except what we bring to the table — unlike any other reality program — is another network that’s in 85 million households,” Engle said. “So it’ll help bring viewers to a cable network and the quid pro quo obviously is there would be talk about Jewelry Television (on the show).”

JTV could possibly air a companion show, the way AMC does with Talking Dead after The Walking Dead, offering additional cross-promotion, Engle said.

Evine Live, the rebranded former ShopHQ, found success when it collaborated with Shark Tank’s Cuban. In August of last year the network premiered Mark Cuban’s American Dream, which featured nine entrepreneurs with new products that the Dallas Mavericks owner had invested in. The segment’s debut racked up the home-shopping network’s highest TV and online viewership in its history.

Last October, Evine Live brought Mark Cuban’s American Dream back for an encore, with five entrepreneurs returning with their best-selling products. One of the big hits was the Monkey Mat, a portable clean surface for babies and children that Cuban and Greiner invested in via Shark Tank.

“We’re strong believers in creating exciting and entertaining shopping experiences, and working with Mark Cuban is certainly all about that: Great ‘retail reality,’ as we would like to say,” Dawn Zaremba, Evine Live’s director of marketing, said.

It’s unclear if Cuban will be coming back to the home-shopping channel. “We are always in discussions with him and others to bring similar entertainment and exclusive products to Evine Live,” Zaremba said.

Linda Moss is a business journalist who writes frequently about home shopping television.

RELATED:Evine Unveils Shareholders Rights Plan

About a year after a proxy fight gave it new owners and a new board of directors, management and direction, Evine Live, the former ShopHQ, is finding the path to success may take a little longer than it first expected.

Expectations were high when New York-based investment adviser The Clinton Group took control of the company in what was at times a contentious proxy fight. A new board of directors — including former Fremantle Media North America CEO and reality show pioneer Thom Beers — and former HSN CEO Mark Bozek were brought in to transform the company from a hawker of watches and jewelry into a retailer with a heavy concentration on proprietary product lines.

The idea was that by intertwining aspects of reality television and TV talent shows, Evine could create a “seamless entertainment transactional experience.”

INITIAL ENTHUSIASM

Early results were good: in the fourth quarter of 2014, Evine grew revenue 4% to $201 million and adjusted EBITDA increased 44% to $7 million. Evine stumbled in Q1, though. Total revenue of $158 million in the quarter fell short of analyst estimates and was down about 1% from the prior year. Cash flow was $1.6 million in the period, down 71% from $5.5 million in the prior year. Sales in the next two quarters would be flat compared to the prior year, Evine also said, with growth not expected until the fourth quarter.

As a result, Evine’s stock has plunged by more than 50% since it reported those results in May and last week raised some eyebrows with the initiation of a shareholders’ rights plan — also known as a “poison pill” — that would make it harder for an outside party to attempt a hostile takeover of the company.

Brean Capital senior vice president and senior analyst equity research Tom Forte said he believes the poison pill is merely a measure to preserve Evine’s $486 million in net operating losses, which are used to offset future tax payments.

That said, Forte said there are two story lines to Evine — the actual company and its stock.

“From the standpoint of the company, you have a CEO, Mark Bozek, who has taken an aggressive approach to transforming the business,” Forte said. “Instead of maintaining the status quo of the business he took over, he has boldly made changes that if successful will position the company for sustained sales and profitability growth.”

Evine management was not immediately available and declined to comment for this article.

Some of those changes include the introduction of a new line of cookware and accessories by celebrity chef Todd English and a surprisingly successful line of seafood and cookware modeled after The Deadliest Catch on Discovery Channel.

The other Evine, its stock, indicates that the transition from Shop HQ to Evine has been “choppy,” Forte said. That’s mainly because the transformation of the company from a watch and jewelry seller to a retailer with its own proprietary brands has taken longer than expected.

“It takes time to build new brands, even the ones I believe will be successful,” Forte said.

Forte is obviously bullish on the stock and his company, Brean Capital, makes a market in Evine securities, but he also has a point.

Even QVC and HSN, the two home-shopping leaders, didn’t make the switch to proprietary brands overnight. And Evine has had some early successes: Mark Cuban’s American Dream, a show starring the Dallas Mavericks owner, investor and Shark Tank panelist, along with a lineup of nine entrepreneurs hawking their own products and inventions, was one of its most-watched programs ever. The addition of English and the success of the Deadliest Catch line, all expected to continue their relationship with Evine, looks encouraging.

But even Forte admits that the Q1 slowdown has created some skepticism in management’s ability to do the job.

PRODUCT MIX QUESTION

While Evine management has said the rebound should begin in the fourth quarter, Forte said the bigger question is whether or not the company can transform its product mix to more than 70% proprietary offerings.

Evine has said proprietary products make up about 33.8% of sales, but Forte believe the figure is more like 20% to 25%.

“When that day comes, I suspect that they will have solid financial performance,” Forte said.

This morning (Nov. 8), live from Henderson, Nev., the Home Shopping Network’s first permanent studio was slated to debut to a national audience. The studio was built into the factory floor of ProCaps Laboratories, a top vendor on HSN.

Previously for the once annual show, the equipment needed to be shipped in for the broadcast, according to TWC Construction which issued a release about the new studio. Now HSN can broadcast live from the Las Vegas area as often as it wants. Viewers can see the vitamins ProCaps Labs sells being made in the background while the broadcast continues from the glass fishbowl studio on the factory floor.

TWC said this was the first broadcast studio built for HSN and the first to be built on the floor of a vitamin factory.

Liberty Interactive took steps toward the ultimate spin-off of its QVC shopping channel into a separate tracking stock Friday, agreeing to move its digital commerce assets into a separate entity Liberty Ventures.

According to Liberty Interactive, digital assets worth about $1.5 billion -- Bodybuiding.com, Backcountry.com. CommerceHub, Evite, Provide Commerce and The Right Start – and $1 billion in cash were attributed to Liberty Ventures. In return Liberty Interactive shareholders will receive 67.67 million shares of Liberty Ventures common stock (0.14 shares of Liberty Ventures stock for each Liberty Interactive share they own). As a result, Liberty Interactive, which includes QVC and Liberty’s interest in rival shopping channel HSN, will change its name to QVC Group.

"We are excited to introduce the QVC Group which focuses on our leadership position in video commerce, enables a cleaner comparable analysis and provides for more targeted share repurchase and equity incentives," said Liberty Interactive CEO Greg Maffei in a statement. "The Liberty Ventures Group is projected to have over $2.7 billion in cash by year end which we can invest in a wide set of opportunities in TMT, including digital commerce."

In addition Liberty Interactive, currently traded on the NASDAQ Exchange under the symbol "LINTA," has applied to NASDAQ to change its symbol to "QVCA." The company said the effective date of the symbol change will be announced separately.

Liberty Interactive first announced plans to spin off the digtal assets and QVC last October.

Those plans were put on temporary hold after the company sold the flower and gifting portion of Provide Commerce to floral giant FTD in exchange for a 35% interest in the combined company.