LOS ANGELES (YBH.ME) – Perhaps the most successful up-from-nowhere woman of all time, Oprah Winfrey, is saying goodbye to daytime syndication in 2011, and hello to her own cable network, tentatively called OWN – Oprah Winfrey Network. In short, as with the best football, basketball and basketball games, you’ll have to be a cable subscriber to get your fix of Oprah in the future.
Oprah Moving On To Cable
“The Oprah Winfrey Show” will end after 25 seasons delivering tears, laughs and local station ratings. It’s been a bedrock deliverer of audience for local station’s throughout its run. Affiliates will now have 18 months to find a show to match that power. Oprah’s personal fortune is estimated at $2.7 billion; she was an early adapter to owning her show, earning her a hefty portion of her syndication and distribution fees.
The classic old school network broadcast audience grows smaller every year, delivering less bang for the buck for advertisers. Oprah’s audience peaked at 12.8 million in 1991, hovering at about 6 million today. Decamping to cable is a logical business decision for her and her production company, Harpo. Partnering with Discovery Communications, OWN will replace the Discovery Health Channel and reach 80 million subscribers with a newly formulated line-up, slated to include a talk format starring Winfrey. Winfrey’s pop culture impact reaches far. When she raves about a book, it sells out; when she sponsored, for the first time, a political candidate, Barack Obama, she added an estimated million voters to his early campaign bandwagon.
Oprah made the announcement on a recent show, stating, “Twenty-five years feels right in my bones, and it feels right in my spirit. It’s the perfect number, the exact right time.”
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Laura spent years as a Hollywood story analyst, did a big 180, and is now an entrepreneur focused on web marketing and analytics. She's also a mom of one.
