QVC Peddles Blend of Shopping, Entertainment

WEST CHESTER, Pa., May 6, 2009 -- It's the middle of the night in eastern Pennsylvania, an hour when most businesses are closed and most residents have long since gone to bed.

But inside a sprawling studio here on the outskirts of Philadelphia, the workday is in full swing, as a parade of peppy, hopeful -- and, in some cases, increasingly nervous -- salespeople get ready to pitch their products on live television to a national audience.

Welcome to the midnight world of QVC, one of the most successful television networks in the United States, the so-called ESPN of shopping. Twenty-four hours a day, on every day of the year except Christmas, QVC beams its blend of shopping and entertainment into 166 million homes worldwide, from the United States to the U.K. to Germany to Asia -- almost anywhere a home shopper sits ready with a credit card and a cable connection.

The wares go far beyond the stereotypical home-shopping mainstays -- commemorative plates and ceramic figurines -- although those are available, too.

A recent 2 a.m. visit to the QVC studios in West Chester revealed the beehive of activity behind the live broadcast. On brightly lit sets made to look like the rooms of a typical home, stage hands assembled and shuffled props while program hosts -- the celebrities of home shopping -- shepherded vendors on and off stage. Backstage, meanwhile, the vendors honed their pitches to make the most of their coveted slots on the network, which are hard to come by but can, if a product takes off, mean giant market success in a matter of minutes.

"In our book, entertainment -- shopping is entertainment, and we don't draw a line and say one minute we are going to entertain you and the next minute we are going to go shopping," said Doug Rose, vice president of programming at QVC (which stands for Quality, Value, Convenience). "We feel when we are doing our job right, shopping is fun to watch."

Part of making QVC fun to watch means airing no commercials -- not that the network needs any. QVC takes a cut of everything it sells. And it has it down to a science.