STAR CJ Network India Ltd, a 50:50 joint venture of News Corp owned Star TV and South Korean firm CJ Shopping, launched its home shopping shows on the channel STAR Utsav last year, and is in the process of launching a full fledged channel, competing with Homeshop18, the home shopping business from the Network18 group that recently raised $23.5 million from another South Korean firm, GS Home Shopping. MediaNama recently spoke with Paritosh Joshi, CEO of STAR CJ Network, on how the company intends to approach the home shopping business, whether they can achieve scale with relatively premium products, distribution plans, mobile and Internet plans, pan-India distribution and much more. Part 1 of the interview: How has been the initial response been, since the launch of the Star CJ Shows? The immediate way of response recording that we have is to monitor the number of phone calls, because our is a direct response kind of a device and the very first day we launched 22nd September we were overwhelmed by the response, we thought we would get about 100 calls in those 6 hours we were telecasting that day, in reality the very first day something like 24000 calls landed up on the PBX. All did not get through because we did not have the human capacity to actually handle all the calls but that was then. What is happened is that ever since then of course the initial madness of generally picking up the phone and dialing a toll…
