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Oprah Enters XM's Orbit
XM Satellite Radio is seeing Sirius Satellite's Howard Stern and raising them one Oprah Winfrey.
The Queen of Daytime announced Thursday that she would be joining the King of All Media's rival radio network and launching a new XM channel called Oprah & Friends, scheduled to debut in September.
"Oprah Winfrey is a prolific force in our culture whose unprecedented achievements in television, film, publishing and philanthropy will bring an amazing radio experience to the XM nation of subscribers," Hugh Panero, president and CEO of XM Satellite Radio, said in a statement.
Winfrey's three-year deal is worth $55 million, a relatively paltry sum in comparison to the $500 million Sirius originally paid to bind Stern to a five-year contract, which is now worth $600 million due to appreciation of Sirius' stock value.
One thing's for certain--the two media heavyweights won't be competing for the same audience.
Oprah & Friends will feature a weekly show hosted by Winfrey and her best friend, Gayle King, as well as programs hosted by other personalities familiar to her talk show audience and O magazine subscribers, including Bob Greene, Dr. Mehmet Oz, and Nate Berkus.
The channel will focus on topics such as fitness, heath and self-improvement, in sharp contrast to the strippers, farters and freak shows that account for large chunks of Stern's programming on Howard 100.
"Together with my friends, we look forward to creating programming that will entertain, inform and inspire our listening audience on XM," Winfrey said in a statement.
While XM is the larger of the two satellite competitors, with more than 6 million subscribers, Sirius has added approximately 1.1 million subscribers since Stern launched his show last month, bringing its total subscribers to 3.3 million.
The companies have been locked in a fierce battle to sign the talent needed to lure larger audiences into paying approximately $13 a month to subscribe to satellite programming.
XM called the deal with Winfrey the last of its big programming decisions, after previously inking an 11-year, $650 million contract with Major League Baseball.
"With this last piece of the puzzle, after you sign a deal with the likes of Oprah, we see nothing else on the horizon of this magnitude," Panero told Reuters.
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