Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, pretty amazing. That's the wrap on Oprah the media personality, but the deal she's working on is, Harpo had been an investor in the cable network Oxygen Media. That gets sold to NBCUniversal in 2007. I assume some of the proceeds from that, she then does a deal with Discovery in 2008, the Discovery Channel, to turn the Discovery Health Channel which is struggling into The Oprah Winfrey Network. The idea is it's going to be a 50-50 JV. Oprah, everything she had been, all the assets she had been contributing to Oxygen will move over. It's going to be her own channel, 50-50 JV with Discovery. I believe in 2017, I think Discovery bought half of Oprah's stakes. They own about 73%–74% and Harpo owns the rest. The plan is they're going to launch in January 2011 because the King World CBS distribution rates for The Oprah Winfrey Show ran through May 2011. They're going to launch in January and then by the second half of the year, they'll be able to run reruns of The Oprah Winfrey Show along with Dr. Phil, Rachel Ray, and everything. The channel actually struggles for a couple of years after they launched it, but again, Oprah and Harpo tuned in. Yeah, let's talk about the channel struggling because what that was is, again playing for the playbook thing, but we talked a lot about this notion of a direct relationship with your audience. Oprah may have been able to reach all those people, but it’s only the email addresses her phone numbers for them. They watched channels that she was on and when she had moved over to a new channel, like Joe Rogan or like a lot of what we're seeing unfold on podcasting now, she doesn't necessarily have an ability to reach out to all those people and say come on over. The first year is very disappointing and the number of people she can actually reach. I think she has talked about this. She underestimated the power of habit. They were used to turning on ABC at 4 PM and just seeing her. Channel 6, yeah.…

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