NEW YORK--Oprah Winfrey is giving network television one of her trademark aha moments.Miss Winfrey, the billionaire queen of daytime television, is planning to announce on 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 Miss Winfrey’s production company, Harpo, said in a letter to her 214 local television stations on 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, the owner of syndication rights to her show, it means the loss of its signature program and millions of dollars every year in revenue.
For ABC stations, where her show was largely seen, it means the loss of daytime’s most popular program, a generator of giant audiences leading into evening news programs.
Larry Gerbrandt, an analyst for the firm Media Valuation 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 the creation months ago.
It will parlay Miss Winfrey’s anticipated exit from broadcast into higher per-subscriber fees and will also seek grander commitments from prospective advertisers.
For Miss 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, Miss 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 daytime 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 seven 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.”
Miss Winfrey, 55, told the staff of her Chicago-based show about her decision late on Thursday afternoon, according to a people who were told but who insisted on anonymity because they agreed to wait until Miss 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 Miss 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 Miss Winfrey and her decision-making process. Discovery executives declined to comment on Thursday evening.
Miss 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.”
Miss 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 Mr. Winfrey was leaning to toward an exit from broadcast.
OWN, which was announced 20 months ago, is expected to replace the Discovery Health Cannel, which is currently available in more than 70 million homes.
A year ago, On 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,” Mr. 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, Miss Winfrey showed that she can command the country’s attention.
Having scored the first TV interview in months with the former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, Miss Winfrey asked her guest if she should be worried about competition, “because I heard you’re going to get your own talk-show.”
Mrs. Palin smiled and answered: “Oprah, you’re the queen of talk-shows.”
