Business

OPRAH DEAL SETS ITS OWN COURSE

Billionaire Oprah Winfrey’s already giant empire just got bigger.

The Queen Bee of TV and Discovery Communications yesterday announced a 50-50 joint venture that will re-brand Discovery Health into OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network.

Winfrey, who will turn 54 at the end of the month, will serve as chairman of the new channel, which will debut next year in about 70 million homes, and have complete editorial control over its programming.

Key to the channel’s success, however, might not be what the TV diva contributes initially, but rather what she can bring to the network down the line – namely, the rights to her talk show.

Those rights are now tied to Oprah’s contract with ABC, which runs through 2011. On a conference call announcing the deal, Oprah said that upon expiration, the rights would likely migrate to the new network.

“Eventually that will happen,” said Winfrey, whose $2.5 billion net worth ranks her 165th on Forbes’ list of the 400 richest Americans.

The expectation is that Winfrey will draw on her magazine, satellite radio show and the family of experts she brings on her talk show like Dr. Oz and Gayle King for OWN.

In addition to her name and voice, Oprah is also contributing the profitable oprah.com Web site to the deal.

But sources said that even with six million unique visitors and about 80 million page views per month, the Web site isn’t worth nearly as much as Discovery Health.

Though the cashless deal is described as an equal partnership, Dis covery is putting up a lot more financially by con tributing a fully distrib uted cable network.

Consider, for instance, that NBC Universal re cently bought Oxygen, which is also available in about 70 million homes, for $925 million. Sources said Discovery Health on its own is worth at least that much – and perhaps as much as $2 billion.

Part of the reason why Discovery was willing to contribute the network to the joint venture is be cause historically the rat ings it generates are low – less than 20 percent of the total ratings at its two main networks, Discov ery and TLC.

While OWN is not being programmed specifically for women, its inspira tional and aspirational focus will appeal to Win frey’s largely female audi ence base, which instantly makes the network a com petitor to Lifetime, Oxygen and We: Women’s Enter tainment.

On the conference call, Winfrey expressed dis enchantment with her Oxygen investment – which she recently cashed out of – saying that the channel “did not reflect [her] voice.”

“The difference here is that I have editorial control and a vision for what we want to accomplish with the network,” she said. peter.lauria@nypost.com