My thought about it is long-term in the perspective of her having 20-30 years to really cultivate her work as a large canopy.
Mastery by Robert Greene talks about the limitations of human lifespan being directly connected to advancement. It takes so long for us to get good at something, maybe 10 years, then it takes time for us to project it out/sell it and get feedback and learn what to refine. Another 10-20 years.
If you mark those years to her age, that means she was hit her 1st level of Mastery by 50.
Then one has to refute past success and learn a new technique, medium to reproduce higher success.
So now 60 years old, she hits her 2nd Mastery sphere with encompassing talents from the previous but in a different, wider domain.
She's 63 now. 3 years into working out this new skill.
It's no coincidence that OWN hit its stride in past few years so she's gained mastery/expertise from her past TV production time til 2009 when the deal was signed, 2011 the old show shutters and its full-time attention to it.
What isn't widely known is that 2016 was the contract renewal time for the deal where Harpo Inc could've walked away with all the shows produced as profit from Discovery.
The underside of the deal has been how to reuse the nearly 5000 TOWS episodes created over 25 years to maintain a company that was at least 70% dependent on one product for 25 years. All of the deals, magazine, Sirius XM, Rachael Ray, Dr. Oz, Dr. Phil, Nate Berkus, TV movies, films, Amazon Kindle, etc, have been to steadily offset that imbalance. Discovery offers a platform to re-monetize old Content at a premium price while using the time to create new valuable content.
Tyler Perry's deal helped and as his new deal with Viacom looks like he and his content are jumping ship, it's not. Years ago, 2005 I think, Viacom acquired King World, the distributor of TOWS but for the prior 20 years ( since Harpo absorbed all production costs) Harpo was paid in King World stock,.
Oprah owns part of Viacom, at least 2% because when Paramount Pictures took It over a few years later they had to negotiate with her and she used that as leverage initially to strengthen the Dr. Phil relationship and hint that if ABC, Cap Cities, Disney didn't pay more for her shows, not just in stock and distribution syndication fee cut but by lowering the number of shows required.
(1986 Harpo had to produce 220 shows, by 2007, 130-150, so the same product increased in value by almost 75%. )
The hint/threat was Oprah would jump from ABC, Disney owned to CBS, Viacom, partially Oprah owned. The Discovery deal is probably better because the upswing is being able to great ao far 30 plus shows on Discovery's dime, a $500 million cash loan as of 2013, retain partial to full ownership of the shows and have a worldwide broad as network already set up for all of this. CBS or ABC could only provide a few hours a week, now Harpo is producing 20-40 hours of programming a week. A ramp up from 5 but not mega overwhelming because remember her team is well trained to expand from a segment, episodic production to full singular productions and at least a fourth of the work are old shows or recycled from the Harpo content library.
It's a demanding deal but its just entering the interesting part now. The new contract is probably 4-7 years. The lack of stress on OWNs part in Perry's content leaving by 2020 is Oprah may well too be gone from Discovery. It will be 10 years by then and maybe she'll just hold out as a boutique production studio with worldwide cred. Harpo shuttered the film division after the Helen Mirren film,Marigolds because the cost is so high on a long bet for films.
The Harpo focus is original Oprahesque original content. There's probably about $1 billion a year in upswing profit and ownership on the table as if you have cable, Oprah is getting about a dime per subscription a month of your bill, about $100-200 million a year before ownership stake in shows and leasing sale of previous Oprah content as new shows plus a cut of new projects. I wouldn't be surprised if the final tally isn't $250- $1 billion per year on average at the 10-year mark split with Discovery.
The challenge is my point of time.
She'll be 67 by 2020, will she want to keep grinding or lay back and act more, become Cicely Tyson?
OWN is in Canada, India, Europe, South America, will the next goal be 10 more years, 2030 to double that $5-10 billion profit?
Or go digital?
The test of A New Earth and all the other digital free broadcasts in 2008- on may have been to build digital media ability to slowly partner with Netflix or Hulu to broadcast. OWN shows are on both, no coincidence but the play might be to test out Netflix and Hulu for a few years then follow CBS/Viacom who has pulled their new content from their initial joint deal with Hulu (which is now Universal and Disney owned) and set up it's own platform. I can see a Discovery CBS like platform with OWN as the linchpin of both to the other.
I can see Oprah pulling a Chelsea Handler and storming Netflix or Hulu with new and old content. A New Earth was averaging 2-5 million internets logged on viewers per episode. Let's call that a weak 2 million viewers or strong 4 million for Oprah content, as again monthly subscribers but instead of Discovery giving Harpo 10 cents per subscriber, Netflix spots the subscribers a month $7.99. Even if they call it $2 a subscriber per show to Harpo, she could aggregate 20 million unique subscribers to one of many shows a month. $40 million a month, $500 million a year.
(Coincidentally last year or so there was a floated rumor story of Disney sending out a missive offer of $500 million a year to her to return to daytime because her show had a halo effect around it that supported early afternoon and evening programming---Judge Judy, Wendy Williams, Steve Harvey, Dr. Phil and Ellen splitting up the chum now but note in there no ABC star.
The rumor has maybe been a softball to lob at the ending of her Discovery contract during negotiations to strengthen and weaken from all sides. Now who made sure the softball got traction is the interesting tidbit.
Let's say she goes bonzo and drops thousands of back episodes plus new content in a ten-year deal after building up viewers worldwide with Discovery for 10 years. A billion or two a year doesn't seem impossible. She could become the Netflix Queen and give them a stronger TV audience and maybe even pull in Viacom and Tyler Perry. I don’t think he's so much leaving as getting into the castle with her.
HARPO under the creation of her and Jeffrey Jacobs has always attached itself to the backs of whales and stayed a streamlined production company that makes partnerships vs tight deals that demand work for pay.
OWN is a chimaera, a changeling that can only be effectively rated in retrospect comparing it's old move to its newest. Oprah is limited only by time and interest. She may have another 20 years to her career but the question is whether she wants to keep changing and partnering to long deals or slowly pare down.
It's future is even and strong but based upon her interest in expansion into the digital world or staying in her 2nd Mastery period of Network management and ownership.
I think having a network, the sole successful person is something she's proud of so I think the future will be an amalgamation of the above that allows her to expand the concept of a network just as she's done side deals with HBO.
As a tidbit side note, there's a lady in China getting 200 million viewers a week on a set that looks like Oprah's. When Oprah interviewed her you could see her appreciation for going bigger, she was at 40 million a week. All of this network stuff may be a way to expand that base viewership worldwide.
A prediction: More international shows on OWN and some kind of sports or awards show. And some sort of world tour where she interviews maybe international stars that we've not seen in America. Actors and actresses and singers from all those partnership countries.
