Oprah Continues Quest For World Domination – To Start OWN Television Network

If the fact that Oprah Winfrey is already running her own TV show, production company, magazine, book club, and Web site wasn’t enough to convince you that Oprah is bent on world domination perhaps this latest news will. Oprah is teaming up with Discovery Communications to create her own TV network.
 
The new television network will be called OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network (as in I OWN this, I OWN you). The network will inherit the distribution platform controlled by the Discovery Health Channel, which reaches 67.7 million cable and satellite homes and will be on the air by 2009.

In a statement, Winfrey said the network “is the evolution of the work I’ve been doing on television all these years and a natural extension of my show.”

The mandate of the network, said David Zaslav, president and CEO of Discovery Communications, is “to entertain, inform and inspire people to live their best lives.”

Oprah will be the chairman of OWN. Discovery and Oprah will each own 50% of the network, but Winfrey will have “full editorial control” over the joint venture, with responsibility for “programming, branding and creative vision.” Discovery will handle distribution and origination of the network.

There’s no word on what exactly the network will air, but I’m guessing there will be more than one Oprah Winfrey produced program on the lineup when they go live. Seriously, the extent of Oprah’s domination over television and media is becoming hard to comprehend. The amount of money and power this will add to her already overflowing coffers should be extraordinary.

I’d say it’s a great move on her part as well as Discovery Communications.