Things aren’t looking very good for Oprah Winfrey’s OWN Network.
Losses at the talk mavens’ stumbling cable channel are approaching a staggering $330 million. Now industry insiders are predicting that if the Oprah Winfrey Network doesn’t make a dramatic turnaround fast, it will be near impossible to survive through the end of the year.
Originally, Discovery partnered 50-50 with Winfrey to launch the network. In fact, it has been underwriting all costs, investing nearly $600 million in the network since 2008. But since its debut on January 1, 2011, OWN has been bleeding money and operating at a deficit. In fact, things are so dismal, one Wall Street media analyst is already calling the channel the most “successful failure in television today.”
David Zaslav, the chief executive officer of Discovery Communications who talked Oprah into the idea of OWN, is famously impatient with money-losing operations within his company.
“I really can’t see Zaslav losing this kind of money for much longer,” one longtime business associate said last week.
But Winfrey is trying to remain optimistic, appearing before advertisers 2 weeks ago to ask for more time.
“I am in the climb of my life,” she told them. “I am climbing Kilimanjaro.”
Though Winfrey herself has relatively little money invested in the channel, her reputation as the most successful TV star of her generation is at risk and she wants to salvage it before the OWN network taints it any further. Her options are to hope Discovery sticks with her financially, risk investing a large stake of her own money in the network, magically turn the network around and into a success, or simply scrap the idea of a network all together and accept defeat.
I am amazed that given her history of being quite savvy with her business decisions that Oprah was apparently NOT prepared to take on a venture of this magnitude (i.e. had NO viable Plan A or B) and yet she still went ahead with it anyway!?!Zaslav should be taken to the woodshed for coming up with the idea in the first place. And Oprah should be taken to the woodshed for agreeing with him. She simply did NOT need to "OWN" her own network and her (failed) efforts thus far make that pretty clear. Greed…smh.