Was it featured on HSN's 'Plug It In'?

Tampa Bay area TV viewers may not have noticed, but WFTT-Ch. 50 stopped airing Home Shopping Network on Jan. 14.

It was part of the price Barry Diller's Home Shopping Network paid in selling 13 broadcast stations and a minority interest in four others to the Spanish-language Univision network last year.

Nationally, HSN of St. Petersburg walked away from about $108-million in annual sales and from 12-million households that don't have cable or satellite TV to pick up HSN. That's about $15-million in annual operating profits, according to a recent SEC filing by HSN parent USA Networks Inc.

An internal debate about dumping the stations dates back to HSN's pre-Diller days. HSN was forced to buy the stations in its formative years so its round-the-clock merchandising would be seen nationally. But HSN brass saw little use for them once the network began paying cable operators to carry the network.

Today, HSN has deals to be seen in 71.4-million cable homes, 871,000 satellite homes and 1.4-million homes that get only broadcast signals.

So after an unsuccessful attempt to switch HSN's broadcast stations to local programming, Diller put them on the auction block.

The company will take a $100-million charge against earnings this year for extra payments to cable operators and marketing expenses to make the switch. In other words, the one-time $1.1-billion net gain from selling the stations to Univision was really only $1-billion.

In the Tampa Bay area, Univision airs Spanish-language shows on WFTT. It's probably better known as Channel 5 on local cable systems such as Time Warner.

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