Winfrey’s
OWN network is showing signs of life after a rocky start, and the
Armstrong interview offered a chance for many more viewers to check it
out. The former Tour de France cyclist admitted to cheating with
performance enhancing drugs throughout his career during the first half
of the interview Thursday night.
That
program was seen by a total of 4.3 million viewers in Thursday’s
back-to-back airings, OWN said Friday. But it drew only 3.2 million
viewers in its first airing, an audience that fell short of OWN’s
most-viewed telecast: an interview Winfrey conducted with the Whitney
Houston family last March following the singer’s death the previous
month.
The second half of the Armstrong interview is to air Friday night.
The
interview “showcases the No. 1 asset this network has over everybody
else — and that’s Oprah Winfrey,” said Erik Logan, co-president of the
network with Sheri Solata. It also showcased about everything else; OWN
relentlessly advertised its programming on just about every commercial
break.
Winfrey, who hosts “Oprah’s
Master Class,” '‘Oprah’s Life Class” and a weekly interview show on
OWN, attended a real-life television management class over the past
three years. The network launch at the dawn of 2011 came during the last
season of Winfrey’s popular syndicated show, and that proved to be a
major strategic error.
The daily
talk show gave Winfrey’s fans their Oprah jolt, and they had little
reason to watch the Oprah Winfrey Network. Winfrey wasn’t much of a
presence there, anyway. She was concentrating on making sure her
syndicated show went out with a flourish.
OWN
flailed for direction with little-noticed celebrity reality shows
featuring the Judds and Ryan and Tatum O’Neal. A Rosie O’Donnell talk
show was an expensive flop.
Discovery
Communications, which sunk a reported $250 million into OWN, told
Winfrey she needed to be more involved with OWN, on and off screen. In
July 2011, she became CEO as well as chairwoman of OWN, replacing
Christina Norman.
“The initial
expectations for this network turned out to be unrealistic,” said Brad
Adgate, an analyst for Horizon Media. “Oprah wasn’t on camera. The shows
weren’t all that good. The network got raked over the coals. People
thought the network would be doing a million viewers (on average) and
it’s doing a third of that.”
The
Discovery networks save money by sharing services, yet OWN had set up
its own fiefdom. That ended. Discovery brought in its executives to take
over legal and business affairs, and OWN laid off one-fifth of its
staff last March. To the outside world it looked like a sinking ship,
while to Discovery the ship was being righted.
“We
were always a lot more confident internally than it looked externally,”
said David Leavy, chief communications officer for Discovery.
Like
all cable networks, OWN has a dual revenue stream with advertising
income as well as payments from cable and satellite operators to carry
it on their systems. In its early days, OWN was operating on fees
negotiated for its predecessor network, Discovery Health. Now much
larger fees negotiated specifically for OWN are kicking in, many of them
at the first of this year. Discovery says OWN will turn profitable this
year.
A network still needs
viewers to sustain itself, and there are some signs of life there, too.
OWN’s prime-time audience averaged 310,000 in 2012, up 30 percent from
2011, the Nielsen company said. Isolate the last three months of each
year and the increase is 61 percent, even more among the target of
middle-aged women.
OWN is carving out a small niche where it hadn’t expected.
The
Saturday night lineup of “Welcome to Sweety Pie’s,” about former Ike
and Tina Turner backup singer Robbie Montgomery’s soul food restaurant
that she operates with her family, and “Iyanla: Fix My Life,” an advice
show with inspirational speaker Iyanla Vanzant, represent the most
successful non-Oprah shows. Another new program, “Six Little McGhees,
which follows the life of an Ohio couple with sextuplets, is also on the
Saturday lineup.
The shows have
drawn an audience of African-American women put off by more
youth-focused programming on networks like BET. OWN’s audience is
roughly one-third black.
OWN
recently reached a deal to develop scripted programming with Tyler
Perry, the creative force behind movies like “Madea’s Family Reunion”
and the TBS series “Tyler Perry’s House of Payne.”
Winfrey
was known for attracting stars and confessions on her syndicated show —
remember Tom Cruise’s couch jump? And even before landing the Armstrong
interview, Winfrey has delivered the goods as an interviewer on her
Sunday night show, “Oprah’s Next Chapter.”
Her
talk with David Letterman that aired earlier this month was one of the
most remarkable interviews the reticent CBS host has ever given. Besides
last year’s interview with the Whitney Houston family, high-rated
episodes of “Oprah’s Next Chapter” have featured Rihanna, Usher, Pastor
Joel Osteen, the Kardashians and Steven Tyler.
The
Armstrong interview aired before the usual Sunday night time slot
partly because it was considered newsworthy enough to rush, but also
because Winfrey had scheduled and promoted a talk with Drew Barrymore
for Sunday.
Considering many
viewers still have to search to find the network on their cable system,
that’s a particularly strong lineup for OWN. She’s more competitive with
the much bigger broadcast networks than could have rightly been
considered.
The impact of the
Armstrong interview won’t be known for a while, Logan said. Winfrey has
called it the biggest interview of her career and it has already drawn
more attention to OWN’s content than anything else so far. Removing the
stench of failure in itself would be a big step.
The
interview could also help OWN reach the 20 million or so cable and
satellite subscribers across the country that currently don’t have it on
their systems, Adgate said.
“They’ll be calling their cable operators and saying, ‘How come I’m not getting this?’” he said.
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