ORLANDO, Fla. – The traditional model of TV shopping is evolving beyond the television screen.

The parent firm of QVC and HSN, known as QVC Group, is currently navigating financial challenges.

Based in West Chester, Pennsylvania, QVC Group has initiated Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings. Just last week, the company hinted at this move in its 2025 annual report, suggesting plans to file as early as the following Wednesday.

The bankruptcy filing addresses the company’s significant debt burden, which exceeds $6.6 billion, and aims to undergo a restructuring to prevent closure. According to a press release, QVC has secured a Restructuring Support Agreement (RSA) with creditors, aiming to reduce this debt to approximately $1.3 billion. The restructuring is expected to trim billions off its debt load, enabling ongoing operations and furthering its ambition to pivot towards livestream and social media shopping. The company will emerge as Reorganized QVC Inc.

This financial restructuring isn’t a sudden development; QVC Group has been grappling with financial instability for a while. Faced with growing competition from social media platforms and streaming services, the company announced in November 2024 that it would rebrand as QVC Group, aiming to transform into a live social shopping enterprise.

In August of 2025, The Wall Street Journal reported that a group of QVC’s top lenders, lenders holding more than 75% of its $3.25 billion revolving credit line, formed a rare cooperation pact to negotiate together as the company’s financial condition worsened.

That move was seen as defensive and came about as QVC’s debt prices had fallen to about 60–64 cents on the dollar. The Journal also reported the company plans to only be in Chapter 11 for just 90 days, though in its annual report, QVC Group warned that cash on hand may not “be sufficient to continue to fund our operations and allow us to satisfy our obligations related to the Chapter 11 Cases until we are able to emerge from the Chapter 11 Cases.”

QVC has drawn down almost all of its credit line, leaving only about $200 million in liquidity, and the company’s stock price has dropped dramatically over the last decade.

• In February 2015, QVC Group (known as Liberty Interactive from 2006-2018 and Qurate Retail from 2018-2025) was trading at an all-time high of about $30.

• By January 2023, the stock had fallen to around $2.58.

• Shares fell below $1 last week, hitting an intraday low in the mid-70-cent range and closing as low as about $0.79. The stock was trading around $2.16 on the morning of April 17, 2026.
• NOTE: Some sources list QVC stock as high as $900 a share, but those figures reflect earlier legacy share structures and are not directly comparable to the current stock price.

The origins of shopping at home on TV

So, what brought all this about? A number of factors, including social media, competition from online shopping, and cable cord-cutting.

The pay TV market (cable, satellite, and telco – fiber optic delivery of cable and internet) hit its peak in the early 2010s at roughly 100–105 million households, or about 87–88% of all U.S. homes. By 2023, that share had dropped to 64%, and by 2025, industry estimates put penetration at roughly 50% or lower. That’s not good news for cable shopping networks that have historically relied on those distribution systems for their largest audiences.

The Home Shopping Network has its roots in radio, starting off on an AM station in Clearwater, Florida in 1977 before jumping to broadcast TV in 1982 and cable in 1985. At its peak, it reached tens of millions of homes primarily via cable and satellite, while also using a group of a dozen broadcast stations to secure carriage.

Under Barry Diller’s USA Broadcasting, those stations – all in top 20 markets – were repurposed in the late 1990s in an attempt at a locally driven “fifth TV network” behind ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox (Diller created Fox Broadcasting in the late 1980s before retiring in 1992). The flagship station of the group was South Florida-based WAMI (its call letters stood for We Are Miami), which experimented with locally produced news and entertainment programs.

The station’s sole news program, The Times – anchored by Ben Mankiewicz – went off the air in December of 2000 with its infamous 5-year Miami forecast. The locally produced programming concept struggled with ratings and high costs, and in 2001 WAMI (along with the other eleven USA Broadcasting stations) was sold to Univision and became either Univision or UniMás (formerly Telefutura) affiliates. HSN was sold to QVC in December of 2017.

QVC on the other hand went on the air in January of 1987 as a cable network and has always been distributed through both cable or satellite and QVC.com. Like HSN, QVC is an acronym: Quality, Value, and Convenience.

The company snapped up competitors in its early years, including The Fashion Channel, CVN, and the J.C. Penney Shopping Channel. By 1992, the whole segment was down to just two main players: QVC and HSN. QVC has also opened brick-and-mortar retail locations, most notably at the Mall of America, along with regional outlet stores.

QVC’s rapid growth was fueled by its focus on live, personality-driven sales, with hosts demonstrating products in real time and encouraging viewers to call in or order on-screen. The model proved highly successful through the 1990s and early 2000s, as cable television expanded into tens of millions of homes.

The company became part of media mogul John Malone’s Liberty Media empire in the 1990s, eventually operating under Liberty Interactive and later Qurate Retail. Over time, QVC expanded internationally, launching networks in the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, and other markets, helping it become one of the largest video commerce retailers in the world.

In 2017, QVC’s parent company acquired longtime rival HSN in a deal valued at more than $2 billion, consolidating the two dominant U.S. home shopping networks under one corporate umbrella. The combined company also includes brands such as Zulily, Ballard Designs, Garnet Hill, Grandin Road, and Frontgate. QVC sold Zulily in 2023.

Like its competitors, QVC benefited from early adoption of e-commerce, launching QVC.com in the 1990s and later expanding into mobile apps and streaming platforms. However, the rise of online retail giants like Amazon, combined with the decline of traditional cable television, put increasing pressure on the company’s core business.

For decades, that model thrived on one key advantage: access to millions of captive cable viewers. But that advantage is rapidly disappearing.

Death by disruption: online shopping and cutting the cord

For years, cable home shopping was the primary alternative if you didn’t want to leave the house to shop. They controlled the pricing narrative, product discovery, and the mechanics of shopping from the living room – from ordering to payment to home delivery.

QVC and HSN were not only the gatekeepers, but they were also the innovators. Many of today’s “buy now, pay later” options – including PayPal, Klarna, Affirm, and Afterpay – trace their roots to installment payment models popularized by QVC and HSN.

The rise of e-commerce, however, has fundamentally changed how people shop.

Online marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, Wayfair, and Etsy made it possible to compare prices instantly, often undercutting the urgency and exclusivity that home shopping networks relied on. Low-cost – and often free – delivery from global e-commerce platforms like Shein, Temu, and Alibaba has further fragmented the market.

Add in the convenience of smartphones – a shopping comparator in every pocket – along with the meteoric rise of influencers and social commerce, and both QVC and HSN quickly found themselves on the outside looking in. Instead of consumers passively watching cable channels, audiences now spend hours on smartphones, browsing social media and shopping apps. The kind of extended viewing that once fueled impulse purchases on QVC and HSN has largely disappeared.

And then there’s TikTok.

Ironically, the core concept behind QVC and HSN – live, personality-driven selling – has not disappeared: it has migrated to new platforms. Influencers on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube now demonstrate products in real time, often reaching larger and younger audiences than traditional broadcast and cable networks.

One of the biggest disruptions is the shift away from linear programming. Unlike traditional TV, where viewers must tune in at specific times, social media platforms not only use algorithms to deliver content directly to users but also make that content available anytime after it’s posted. And it can be easily shared.

That shift has made product discovery more personalized – and far more competitive.

Frankenstein, meet your monster(s)

The steady decline of cable television has reduced QVC and HSN’s reach as millions of households cancel pay TV subscriptions each year and the built-in audience that once sustained home shopping networks continues to shrink. Meanwhile, social media and smartphone use continue to rise. Together, these changes have created a perfect storm for the legacy cable shopping brands: fewer viewers, more competition, and a retail landscape dominated by digital platforms.

For the QVC Group, the question now is whether those changes are too little, too late. The company said it will not only “amplify” their streaming channels (both QVC+ and HSN+), but they also said they are developing streaming commerce options for other channels including Roku, Hulu, YouTube TV, and Netflix – yes, you read that right.

In their November 2025 press release, the company acknowledged that consumers are spending more time on social media because that’s increasingly where consumers are now discovering and buying products.

But moving forward, QVC and HSN are not only competing against traditional online retailers and smartphone apps, but platforms that in many ways modeled themselves after the two OG shopping networks: TikTok Shop, Amazon Live, Instagram shopping, YouTube, Facebook Live, and Whatnot.

In other words, the companies that pioneered influencer-driven retail – before influencers were even a thing – now face stiff competition from the very model they helped create. The model that once defined QVC and HSN hasn’t disappeared – it just no longer lives exclusively on cable television.