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Oprah Winfrey, in an exclusive hour long sit down interview broadcast earlier this evening on CNBC Africa (DStv 410) readily talked about her new venture, her TV channel the Oprah Winfrey Network (or OWN for short) and admitted that it was ''far more challenging than I imagined''.
Talking to Godfrey Mutizwa in a special edition of Africa Prime, the talk show host whose 25th and final season of The Oprah Winfrey Show can still be seen in reruns on SABC3, said starting a TV channel is a big learning curve for her but that she doesn't miss her talk show that ended last year. ''I don't miss it because I was ready for it to end.''
''It is a gargantuan task and all my friends who've done it – like Ted Turner who've started CNN, Barry Diller who started the Fox network in America and other people who started the Comedy network said to me 'You don't understand, this is a gigantic thing you're taking on.''
''I went from doing one hour a day to trying to create 24 hours of content a day!'' Oprah Winfrey said. ''It has been yet another learning curve for me. But the reason why I did it was that I wanted to maintain the platform for being able to expose people to programming that I feel is stimulating, uplifting, interesting and that open the heart space of people. I didn't want to lose that. I would rather try and fail, than to be owned and controlled by someone else and their ideas of the work that I could do,'' she said.
On her new talk show Oprah's Next Chapter that is now getting the highest viewership on OWN since the channel launched a year ago, she says ''the new show is about me leaving the studio and going out and experiencing the world and talking to the people that I really want to talk to; me interested in their ideas and experiences. It's about opening up the world so people can see through my experiences that we are all more alike.''
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