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Oprah Winfrey’s cable channel has suffered losses that are fast approaching a staggering 330 million dollars, according to a report. And now industry insiders are predicting that the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) will not be able to survive another year if it does not find a hit show to help it in making a dramatic turnaround. According to a report in Businessweek magazine over the weekend, Discovery, which partnered 50-50 with Winfrey to launch the network and has been underwriting its costs, has already invested nearly 600 million dollars in it since 2008, Fox News reported. But since it started on the air in January 2011, “OWN may have lost as much as 330 million dollars,” it reported. The magazine quoted one Wall Street media analyst as calling the channel the most “successful failure in television today.” David Zaslav, Discovery Communications’ CEO who talked Winfrey into the idea of OWN, is famously impatient with money-losing operations within his company. He closed a channel Discovery operated with The New York Times in 2008 and killed Planet Green, an eco channel, just last month. “I really can’t see Zaslav losing this kind of money for much longer,” one long-time business associate said last week. Though Winfrey herself has relatively little money invested in the channel, her image as the most successful TV star of her generation is on the line.

Oprah Winfrey’s OWN channel loses $330m