She will be chairwoman of the network, owned 50-50 by Discovery
and her company, Harpo Productions Inc. In return for taking over a
network already operated by Discovery, Winfrey gives half ownership
of the Oprah.com Web site.
Discovery owns 13 networks in the United States, including
Discovery, TLC and Animal Planet. Discovery Health is one of the
least successful, and company President and CEO David Zaslav was
looking for ideas about what to do with it when his wife handed him
a copy of Oprah's magazine.
He approached Winfrey about a partnership, coincidentally
shortly after she had come upon an entry for her diary dated May
24, 1992, when she wrote about her idea for creating her own
network.
"David came and really spoke about the vision I'd been having
for 15 years," she said. "It felt like, 'I can't believe you're
saying this.'"
Zaslav said that Discovery's core mission is knowledge and
curiosity and "this is right in our sweet spot."
Winfrey envisions the programming dealing with issues such as
money, health, weight, relationships and raising children. Some of
the stable of in-house experts she uses on "Oprah" and the XM
satellite radio station might be expected to contribute.
While Winfrey will be the face of the new network, she won't
have much of a presence, at least at first. She is under contract
to continue on "Oprah" through May 2011, a deal that prohibits
the use of reruns on her own network.
After that, she could continue her show on broadcast TV or do it
for the cable network, and may reach a deal to allow reruns on OWN.
Taking "Oprah" off broadcast TV, however, could reduce its
visibility and in turn make the cable network less valuable.
Winfrey said she needed to decide this fall whether to continue
her syndicated show beyond 2011.
Winfrey was an early and visible investor in the development of
Oxygen, a network for women that was created in the 1990s. She said
she quickly determined that Oxygen "did not reflect my voice" and
she removed herself from the company's board after a few meetings.
"The difference here is I will have editorial control and there
is a vision for what I want to do with this network," she said.
Oxygen was also a startup in an industry where it's becoming
harder to introduce new networks, while OWN will have the built-in
advantage of already being in nearly two-thirds of the nation's
homes with television.
Email
This Article To A Friend
