ShopTV Canada featured direct response advertising in short and long form with lengths ranging from 30 seconds to 28.5 minutes from a wide range of categories including automotive, beauty & personal care, entertainment, health & fitness, home improvement, and real estate.

This was done so in an effort to boost subscriptions to the Toronto Star, by offering a glimpse of what readers could expect from the newspaper itself.

[3] In April 2003, Torstar rebranded the network, this time as ShopTV Canada,[4] in an effort to better reflect the type of programming the channel broadcasts.

On Rogers' cable systems in the Toronto area (the only providers carrying it at that point), its channel position was replaced for digital cable customers with a free-preview channel (initially carrying Nickelodeon), and was not replaced for analog customers, although its slot is now occupied by WGRZ Buffalo in some areas.

ShopTV Canada was classified as a teleshopping service by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), and thus, was exempted from requiring a CRTC-issued licence to operate and most other CRTC requirements to which pay TV and specialty channels are subject.