OPRAH'S OWN NETWORK OFF TO A GOOD START!

PASADENA - Oprah Winfrey says the first two days of her OWN television network generated 866 pages of viewer messages - and she has personally read "more than 200" of them.

It's an encouraging response, Winfrey told the Television Critics Association here Thursday, to what she called "a gift" - the Oprah Winfrey Network.

Gratified as she was by the messages, though, she said, OWN's pledge remains the same: "You can watch this channel 24 hours a day and you will never find one thing that causes you not to sleep at night."

Christina Norman, CEO of OWN, said the channel drew 7.6 million viewers its first day - Saturday - and 13.6 million its first three days.

One of those, said Winfrey, is a viewer who previously watched almost no television at all - Oprah.

"I never had the TV on in my house," she said. "Now it's on all the time - to OWN. I see television in a different way now. For instance, I never loved commercials before. Now every time I see one, it's 'I love you, Chevrolet.'"

The channel launched with just one live every-weekday show: the talk show hosted by Winfrey's long-time friend Gayle King.

Winfrey said her initial goal was to generate 600 hours of original programming by the end of the year, but she now feels that number might need to increase, because "I fear people will get tired of repetition."

It is expected that after Winfrey's 25-year syndicated talk show ends in September, edited reruns of those shows will become a regular OWN feature.

To help generate original content, OWN is now running a competition where the winner will get at least six episodes of his or her own program on the network.

That contest symbolizes the channel's whole message, "that you can do it," said Winfrey.

She admitted, however, that running a channel turned out to be more work than she originally envisioned.

"I saw myself leaving [her daily show] and relaxing," she said. "Then I would run the channel in my spare time. It doesn't work that way. My next vacation will be in 2014."

But she said it's worth it.

"Even if the channel didn't work - and it will - it would be worth the risk," she said, "Whenever I've outgrown what I was doing, I've moved on, and it was time."

When she was growing up in Mississippi, she recalled, her grandmother would not buy a television set "because she thought it was the work of the devil.

"Her only dream for me was that I would find 'nice white folks' who would buy me clothes and let me bring food home and not demean me.

"When we opened OWN, I was thinking that my grandmother wouldn't even understand what it was. But her spirit was there with me."


SOURCE