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The slate is practical--gab shows are faster and cheaper to create--and also fits Laybourne's goal to service women "underserved" by TV (the name Oxygen, she says, alludes to giving women "room to breathe"). As Mandabach notes, the schedule breaks down a woman's day into blocks: yoga in the early morning, news and views in daytime, comedy and interviews for unwinding at night. It's meat-and-potatoes nonfiction programming, but female-centric. "If women programmed World News Tonight, the lineup would be totally different," says Roni Selig, executive producer of Pure Oxygen, the network's flagship daily two-hour talk show. "If there's a story about a health initiative for women, that's going to be our big story." And there's plenty of irreverence: Pajama Party's host interviews celebrities in their PJs; a Pure Oxygen host introduces a female political analyst as a "political diva."
The other key to Oxygen's strategy is synergy between its Web and TV offerings, including close co-operation between its online and TV staffs. Says Exhale's co-executive producer Scott Carter: "Oxygen will be one-stop shopping for women." We've heard such talk before from outfits like MSNBC, which downplayed its on-air techno theme considerably after launching. It's still unclear how, if at all, online and TV will profitably coexist, and much of Oxygen's synergy efforts, such as sending viewers to the website for forums and further information, are already being done by other channels. Indeed, many of its producers concede as much, and Oxygen is still working out what some of the sites connected with its shows will contain. "We can't be judged on the first day," Werner says. "We hope our audience will understand we are still crawling." But Oxygen's website (see box) is ambitious and growing, and the network is employing some innovations, such as a permanent strip at the bottom of the TV screen that can refer viewers to the website (and, during commercials, to advertisers' sites).
And then there's Oprah. Winfrey will be the host of a 12-episode introduction to Web surfing, Oprah Goes Online, which Oxygen hopes can lure and keep Net newbies--and perhaps do for the Web what Winfrey has done for book publishing. (Winfrey also plans an interview show, Oprah &..., which will feature longer conversations than her talk show.)
Oxygen faces big obstacles, chief among them the fact that you probably can't watch it. It's tough for new cable channels to crack carriers' crowded lineups, and Oxygen will be in only 10 million homes when it launches--and unavailable in New York City and much of Los Angeles, capitals of advertising and media. The women's network Lifetime, by contrast, is in more than 75 million homes.
For supposed competitors, Lifetime and Oxygen seem wary of competing with each other--overtly, anyway. "We're not just different from Lifetime," says Laybourne. "We're different from all TV." Lifetime's president and CEO, Carole Black, emphasizes that there's room in the cable market for both networks to grow, and it's true that they have little overlap, given Lifetime's emphasis on movies, series (Any Day Now, Oh Baby) and reruns and Oxygen's on nonfiction. But Lifetime seems to be responding to Oxygen. It has just announced Lifetime Live, a daily one-hour news and information show to be produced by its Disney sibling ABC, and it is relaunching its website on Feb. 24.