Oprah Winfrey is giving network television one of her trademark aha moments.
Winfrey, the billionaire queen of daytime television, is planning to announce Friday that she will step down from her daily pulpit, "The Oprah Winfrey Show," in two years in order to concentrate on the forthcoming cable channel that will bear her name.
"The sun will set on the Oprah show as its 25th season draws to a close on Sept. 9, 2011," Tim Bennett, the president of Winfrey's production company, Harpo, said in a letter to her 214 local TV stations Thursday evening. She will appear on her cable channel, called OWN: the Oprah Winfrey Network, in some form. But "The Oprah Winfrey Show" will no longer be.
The list of repercussions of her decision is long. For CBS, owner of the syndication rights to her show, it means the loss of its signature program and millions of dollars every year in revenue. For ABC, where her show was largely shown, it means the loss of daytime's most popular show, a generator of a massive audience leading into its evening news programs.
Larry Gerbrandt, an analyst for the firm Media Evaluation Partners, said "any show that ABC comes up with to replace her will not draw anything near the ratings guarantee they could count on with Oprah. At least for the first year, ABC is going to take a serious hit."
More widely, her departure will surely be interpreted as an endorsement of the cable TV business, and a blow to the fortunes of broadcast television. Discovery Communications, which will co-own the new OWN channel, announced it creation 20 month ago. It will parlay Winfrey's anticipated exit from broadcast into higher per-subscriber fees and will also seek grander commitments from prospective advertisers.
For Winfrey herself, the move represents an enormous bet - that her popularity and golden touch with programming can sustain an entire cable channel and that she'll remain a central cultural figure even without the mass exposure of broadcast television every day.
Far and away the most popular daytime talk show host, Winfrey has spent two decades spinning her TV fame into a vast media empire, including her own program, a popular magazine, a book club, several movies and one of the most successful daytimes producers in television, with talk shows like "Dr. Phil," "Rachael Ray," and this season's syndicated success story, "Dr. Oz." "The Oprah Winfrey Show" dominates daytime TV; it regularly draws 7 million viewers, nearly twice as many as the next biggest talk show, "Dr. Phil." Her endorsement of Barack Obama is widely credited with helping elect him President in 2008. She even claims to own the trademark on the phrase "Aha moment."
Winfrey, 55, told the staff of her Chicago-based show about her decision late Thursday afternoon, according to a people who were told but who insisted on anonymity because they agreed to wait until Winfrey makes the official announcement. Then she informed her business partners at the networks and instructed Harpo employees to start calling her affiliate stations. The stations were told they could report her decision on local newscasts, apparently to boost audience for her formal announcement on Friday.
It remains unclear what on-camera role Winfrey will have at OWN, which is a 50-50 joint venture with Discovery Communications. The management team at OWN has been busy creating a programming plan but have remained mostly silent about the line-up in deference to Winfrey and her decision-making process. Discovery executives declined to comment Thursday evening.
Winfrey made clear to her staffers that she will not transfer the show to cable. She is expected to produce new programs for OWN, and may appear occasionally on some of them.
CBS Television Distribution seemed eager to keep its door propped open, saying in a statement that "we look forward to working with her for the next several years, and hopefully afterwards as well," adding "we know that anything she turns her hand to will be a great success."
Winfrey was in renewal talks with CBS and another syndicator, Sony, which distributes her most recent spin-off, "The Dr. Oz Show." In recent days television executives said they sensed that Winfrey was leaning toward an exit from broadcast.
OWN, which was announced 20 months ago, is expected to replace the Discovery Health Channel, which is currently available in more than 70 million homes. A year ago, One year ago Discovery's chief executive, David Zaslav, predicted this day might come, saying "her show will go off of ABC in syndication and she will come to OWN."
"This is her chapter two," Zaslav said then.
"It wasn't just the show. Oprah had a much bigger impact than that. She introduced other shows like `Dr. Phil." She launched books with her book club and she had the magazine, She was phenomenon."
As recently as Monday, Winfrey showed that she can command the country's attention. Having scored the first TV interview in months with the former Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, Winfrey asked her guest if she should be worried about competition, "because I heard you're going to get your own talk show."
Palin smiled and answered: "Oprah, you're the queen of talk shows."