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To: HPilot who wrote (11072)	9/15/1999 10:04:00 PM
From: Thomas Kirwin	Respond to of 17679

ValueVision teams with NBCi to start SnapTV Wednesday September 15, 7:31 pm Eastern Time By Derek Caney NEW YORK, Sept 15 (Reuters) - NBC will team up its consumer Internet business with ValueVision International Inc. to revamp the television home shopping channel into a blend of cable TV, internet and electronic commerce, the companies said. ''We believed pretty early on that our future wasn't going to be in a QVC or Home Shopping network kind of venture,'' Gene McCaffery, chairman, president and chief executive of ValueVision said in a telephone conference call Wednesday. ''We knew we needed partners who were going to guide our 32 million viewers on the Web. And that's what (NBC's Internet properties) will help us do.'' McCaffery was referring to ValueVision's (Nasdaq:VVTV - news) main competition in the home shopping television market, QVC, jointly owned by Comcast Corp. (Nasdaq:CMCSA - news) and subsidiaries of Liberty Media Group (NYSE:LMGa - news) and USA Network Inc.'s (Nasdaq:USAI - news) Home Shopping Network. Over the next six to nine months, the ValueVision home shopping channel will change its name to SnapTV and its VVTV.com web site will be renamed SnapTV.com. The new channel and site will be hosted by NBC's Snap.com, a shopping Website and Internet gateway that will be merged with another direct marketing Web site, Xoom.com, to create NBC Interactive, or NBCi. NBC, a unit of General Electric Co. (NYSE:GE - news), will own 49.9 percent of NBCi after the merger. GE's equity unit and NBC jointly own 39.9 percent of ValueVision. NBCi will build up the channel and Web site's e-commerce infrastructure, oversee database management, e-mail marketing and sales and other direct e-commerce operations. ValueVision and NBCi will split revenues from advertising, web broadcasting and product sales. ValueVision and Xoom.com have swapped about $10 million in warrants to acquire small minority stakes in each other's company. ValueVision's SnapTV channel and Web site will also benefit from the $90 million that NBCi plans to spend promoting the Snap.com and Xoom.com Web sites on the NBC network. What NBCi gets out of the deal is an expansion of outlets for the Snap.com brand name. ''You can't be in too many places and the worst thing that can happen to you is that people don't know about you,'' said Chris Kitze, chairman of Xoom.com and who is slated to be chief executive of NBCi. ''There is no other portal with a television channel named after them, not Yahoo (Nasdaq:YHOO - news), not Amazon (Nasdaq:AMZN - news),'' he said in an interview with Reuters. "It represents an amazing opportunity for us to get our name out. ''And from ValueVision's perspective, QVC and Home Shopping Network aren't aligned with a major portal to drive traffic to their web site,'' he added. ''The only people they can drive to their web site are the people who are watching that television channel.'' Earlier this year, Home Shopping Network offered sports merchandise over the Lycos Inc.'s (Nasdaq:LCOS - news) Web site as a tie-in with the National Collegiate Athletic Association basketball tournament. The ValueVision-NBCi deal will enable SnapTV to sell products to Snap.com and Xoom.com's 13 million customers. In return, NBCi will have SnapTV's 32 million viewers as potential customers. ''In ValueVision, you have a company that has experience selling hundreds of millions of dollars of merchandise through the television. We're going to help them sell those products through the web,'' Kitze said. For example, a SnapTV television program could be followed by a web presentation or auction on SnapTV.com. Revenues from products sold through the television program would continue to go to ValueVision. But any revenue generated from product sales on the following web presentation would be split between ValueVision and NBCi. Snap.com could directly market its products and services to anyone who logged on during the web presentation. That revenue would be split. The two would split advertising revenue from clients advertising on both sites. ValueVision and NBCi would split revenues derived from products or companies that Snap.com attracted to the television channel. ''It's all revenue we wouldn't have had otherwise,'' ValueVision's McCaffery said. ValueVision shares closed down 2-7/8 at 25 Wednesday.