The Oprah Winfrey Network seems to have everything needed to succeed: some of the best creative minds in the business, strong financial backing, a loyal audience and enthusiastic advertisers eager to buy commercial time.
But more than 20 months after the announcement that Winfrey was teaming with Discovery Communications Inc. to create a cable channel that celebrates her ethos, "Living your best life," not much has happened -- except for a revolving door of executives.
Three top programmers abruptly left the Los Angeles-based network in recent months, and development spending has been cut. OWN was supposed to have launched by now, but its debut has been pushed back to mid-2010.
Executives declined to provide a new target date.
"It's kind of like the Death Star over there -- not a lot is coming out," said Brent Poer, managing director of the West Coast offices of the ad-buying firm MediaVest. "This is a signal that they are trying to decide who they are."
This is not the first time Winfrey has been part of a high-profile cable channel, and the last one -- Oxygen, launched in 1999 -- failed to live up to expectations. It was slow to get distribution over cable and then struggled as an independent competing against media giants with deep pockets.
Winfrey eventually distanced herself from Oxygen, calling the channel a disappointment, in part because "it did not reflect my voice." The channel is now owned by NBC Universal.
Winfrey's new venture doesn't lack for strong voices. One is David Zaslav, the hard-charging chief executive of Discovery Communications, who has been shaking up the onetime sleepy company since he arrived from NBC in 2007. Another is Tom Freston, the architect of MTV and former chief executive of Viacom Inc., who was recruited to OWN more than a year ago as a consultant and is considered internally to be the resident sage.
Freston was instrumental in hiring Christina Norman, the driven former president of Viacom's VH-1 and MTV, who became chief executive of OWN in February. The management group decided that it needed someone with experience running the cable channel.
Norman wanted her own team. In April, the channel's president, Robin Schwartz, abruptly resigned. Schwartz was one of the channel's first employees, hired in 2008 after making such a powerful presentation about the types of uplifting programs that she would develop for OWN that it brought tears to Winfrey's eyes.
