iBuy
iBuy was a British satellite home shopping channel that broadcast on Sky from 18 April 2005 until May 2007. Owned by IAC/HSN, the American home shopping group behind HSN, it operated as a falling-price auction channel in the mould of bid TV and price-drop TV, selling products live on air as their prices dropped until the stock was gone. Based first at Teddington Studios and later in Chiswick, London, iBuy aired from 9am to midnight seven days a week on Sky channel 631, spawned a sister channel, iBuy2, and even reached Freeview viewers for a few hours a day via Five US. Despite energetic presentation and heavily discounted designer goods, it could not break into a British TV shopping market already dominated by established rivals, and live broadcasting ended in March 2007 amid financial difficulties.
Launch and ownership
iBuy was created and launched on 18 April 2005 by Andy Sheldon, a television shopping executive who became the channel's head of broadcasting. It was financed and owned by the US home shopping company HSN, whose parent IAC/HSN competed in America with the QVC network. The channel initially broadcast from the former Auction World.tv studio at Teddington Studios, the south-west London complex long associated with television production, before relocating to Studio 1 at Hogarth Business Park in Chiswick. From the start, iBuy's proposition was simple: live, presenter-led auctions in which the price only ever moved in one direction — down — and every successful buyer paid the final, lowest price.
The falling-price format
The channel's signature mechanic was the 'Freefall' auction. Viewers placed bids by calling a premium-rate telephone number shown on screen or by logging on to the channel's website, ibuy.tv. As an auction ran, the price of the item fell until the entire quantity was sold. Drops came in larger steps the channel called a 'Price plunge', and on-screen graphics built the tension: a 'Stock Warning' appeared when quantities grew limited, and 'Critical Stock' was sometimes displayed when only the final few items remained. Crucially, all buyers in an auction paid the lowest price displayed at the end, plus postage, regardless of when they had bid — a rule designed to encourage viewers to join early without fear of overpaying.
What iBuy sold
Contemporary newspaper guides to TV shopping highlighted iBuy's designer accessories at strikingly low prices. Chloé sunglasses were reported selling for £9 against a retail price of £130, Fendi bags went for less than half their retail price, and brands such as Christian Dior, Dolce & Gabbana, Gucci, Prada and Balenciaga featured alongside Klaus Kobec sports and diamond watches and jewellery. Fashion items, from trainers and leather handbags to Birkenstock sandals, formed a large part of the offer. The combination of recognisable luxury names and auction drama was the channel's pitch to viewers who might otherwise have shopped with QVC or Ideal World.
iBuy2 and the spin-off formats
The channel family grew with iBuy2, a sister service on Sky channel 632 broadcasting seven days a week. It too carried live falling-price auctions, but from a separate studio — the former home of the defunct HSN-owned quiz channel Quiz TV. Before iBuy2 ended on 18 February 2007, its sales had switched to a fixed-price format. The main channel also experimented with strand formats for its off-air hours: 'iBuy Choice' offered pre-recorded fixed-price sales, and this was replaced by 'iBuy Unique', which used a lowest-unique-bid auction concept in which the winning bid was the lowest amount nobody else had matched.
Reaching Freeview through Five US
Although iBuy was fundamentally a Sky channel, towards the end of 2006 it also broadcast between 9am and midday on Five US. That arrangement catered for the Freeview market, giving the channel a morning window on digital terrestrial television and access to households without satellite. The slot showed the ambitions of a channel trying to widen its funnel of potential buyers at a time when Freeview was rapidly becoming Britain's most common digital platform. Even so, the core business remained the Sky service on channel 631 and its companion website.
The Auction World connection
iBuy's launch came shortly after the collapse of Auction World.tv, and the similarities between the two channels — ideas, products, contacts and employees — were widely noted. Andy Sheldon had been head of production at Auction World and Adam Freeman was another long-term colleague; after Auction World's collapse the pair found new backers in HSN and set up iBuy, taking on much of Auction World's redundant production and floor staff, its products and channel contacts, and initially its Teddington studio, production office and warehouse. Other Auction World figures, including company director Tim Cochran, operations director Sandy Sandcaster and customer services manager Simon Stedman, also became involved. The channel was keen to stress, however, that it was a different company from Auction World: it was owned and financed by HSN, not by Auction World's creators.
Dropped by NTL
On 28 August 2006 Britain's biggest digital cable operator, NTL, dropped iBuy from its platform, ending the channel's cable carriage (contemporary listings had shown it on NTL channels 23 and 115). Before the termination iBuy complained to UK regulators that NTL — which owned sit-up Limited, the competitor behind bid TV, price-drop TV and speed auction TV — was abusing its dominant position in the cable market. Both the Office of Fair Trading and Ofcom declined to act, citing a lack of resources and unproven accusations. Media websites suggested at the time that NTL's real reason may have been financial problems at the HSN-financed channel, though those allegations were unproven. Losing cable distribution nonetheless cut iBuy off from a significant pool of potential shoppers.
Presenters and on-screen faces
Live auction television depended on its presenters, and iBuy employed a large roster. Adam Freeman was its main presenter, and the team over the channel's life included Darren Simons, John Hammond, Craig Rowe, Alex Knowles, Mike Mason, Mark Stuart, Paul Lavers, Greg Scott, Elisa Portelli, Gemma Scott, Caroline Artus, Victoria Showers, Fayon Cottrell, Anoushka Williams, Genevieve Mullen, Georgina Burnett, Zilpah Hartley, Polly Parsons, Laura Hamilton and Roshanth Gardiarachchi. Debbie Flint, who had helped create Ideal World with Paul Lavers and Steve Whatley, appeared on iBuy as a guest host in early October 2006 — an illustration of how small and interconnected the British TV shopping world was. The channel also received an unlikely television credit of its own: in 2006 it featured in the BBC Three Welcome to My World documentary 'Porno, Preachers and Peddlers', alongside Television X, Girl Fever and Revelation TV.
Closure in 2007
The end came quickly in the spring of 2007. On 18 March, Adam Freeman revealed on air that it was his final shift and that he was moving to parent company HSN for employment in the USA; Sheldon likewise went on to become a senior vice president of broadcasting at HSN in America. On 27 March 2007 the channel's website officially announced that iBuy had ceased live broadcasting, and the service finally closed in May 2007, its Sky slot replaced by JML Direct TV while iBuy2's was replaced by Shop Now TV. The reasons cited were financial difficulties and a failure to break into a market already dominated by QVC UK, sit-up's bid TV, price-drop TV and speed auction TV, Ideal World and Gems TV.
Legacy
iBuy lasted barely two years, but it remains a neatly preserved example of mid-2000s British television retailing: premium-rate phone bidding, falling prices, manufactured urgency and designer labels at auction prices, all delivered live for fifteen hours a day. Its story also captures the era's platform politics — a channel owned by a US shopping giant, staffed by veterans of a collapsed British rival, fighting a cable operator that owned three of its competitors. For viewers, it was briefly a place where a pair of designer sunglasses might fall to single figures; for the industry, it was proof of how hard it was for even a well-backed newcomer to dislodge the incumbents of UK TV shopping.
