Home Shopping Network

The Home Shopping Network (HSN) is a mostly 24-hour shopping network that is seen on cable, satellite, and some terrestrial channels in the United States.

Launched by Lowell 'Bud' Paxson and Roy Speer in 1982 as the Home Shopping Club, a local cable channel seen on Vision Cable and Group W Cable in Pinellas County, Florida, and expanded into the first national shopping network three years later on July 1, 1985, HSN (its initials forming its alternate name) pioneered the concept of the viewer shopping for items in the comfort of their own home.

HSN has its roots from a radio station managed by Paxson which in 1977; due to an advertiser's liquidity problem, the company was paid in can openers. Left with having to raise the funds, on-air personality Bob Circosta went on the radio and sold the can openers for $9.95 each. Lo and behold, the can openers sold out and an industry was born. Bob Circosta later became the new network's first ever home shopping host and would eventually sell 75,000 different products in over 20,000 hours of live, on-air television.

It is now owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp with broadcasts in Europe, Asia, and the Indian subcontinent.

HSN, one of the leading shopping channels on television, has built its reputation with daily specials, theme blocks, and personalities. HSN begins each calendar day with a "Today's Special," a featured item at a special sale price. Every item that they sell can be reviewed by an individual on their website (one to five stars), and every product that has an average of four stars or higher is considered to be a "Customer Pick".

In 1986, HSN began a second network that broadcast over the air on a number of TV stations it had acquired under the name Silver King Broadcasting. In 1999, the stations were sold to IAC founder Barry Diller and changed its name to USA Broadcasting, with a few of them ending HSN programming outside of overnight hours and taking on a local programming format equivalent to Toronto's Citytv. In 2001, they were sold again, this time to Univision, and all HSN programs ceased on those channels; however, HSN continues to air on low-power stations. Ventana Television (ventana meaning window in Spanish) has the same street address as HSN, and is the holding company for its broadcast licenses.