History
The privately held company Oxygen Media was founded in 1998 by former Nickelodeon executive Geraldine Laybourne, talk show host Oprah Winfrey and producers Marcy Carsey, Tom Werner and Caryn Mandabach (of Carsey-Werner fame). The company's cable network Oxygen launched on February 2, 2000.
TV studios were initially located at Battery Park City near the World Trade Center. It was knocked off the air on September 11, 2001; the Time-Warner all-news cable television channel NY1 was broadcast to all Oxygen subscribers across the country until the studio reopened within a week after the attack.
The network's studios have subsequently consolidated in the Chelsea Market, a former Nabisco factory at 15th Street and Ninth Avenue in New York.
The channel originally began as an interactive service focusing on original programming with some reruns (such as Kate & Allie), and featured a black bar at the bottom of the screen (referred to as "the stripe" it occupied the bottom 12% of the screen) which would show various information (the interactive part involved the channel's website); the technique was cloned by Spike's precursor The New TNN. Today, the stripe has long been dropped, and the channel focuses chiefly on reality shows, reruns, and movies, and airs week-after repeats of The Tyra Banks Show and is directed towards women. The yoga/meditation/exercise program "Inhale" was the last inaugural Oxygen program on air into the channel's NBC Universal era, albeit in repeats. It was canceled in 2010.
Campus Ladies, Bliss, Oprah After the Show, Talk Sex with Sue Johanson, The Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency, Snapped, Girls Behaving Badly and The Bad Girls Club, a reality series, are some of the signature shows on the channel. Geraldine Laybourne was the service's founder, chairman, and CEO, staying with the channel until the NBCU sale. Competitors to the channel include Lifetime (incidentally, its parent company is 15% owned by Oxygen's parent company) and WE tv. Oxygen has been available on DirecTV for many years, and arrived on Dish Network in early 2006 during that provider's carriage conflict with Lifetime.
On October 9, 2007, NBCUniversal announced it would be purchasing Oxygen for $925 million. The sale was completed on November 20, 2007. NBC Universal's cable division announced at an industry upfront presentation on April 23, 2008 that the channel would see a rebranding and new logo on June 17, 2008, and in the months since the sale the Oh! heading was dropped from the channel's visual branding. The logo premiered a week early on June 8, 2008.
For the 2008 Summer Olympics, Oxygen aired events and programming weeknights relating to gymnastics, equestrian, and synchronized swimming. This was merely the second time Oxygen had carried sports, as before 2005, the channel carried a limited schedule of regular season WNBA games produced by NBA TV.
As of late 2008, the channel is available in 74 million American households.
On June 29, 2009, Oxygen premiered Dance Your Ass Off, which is a dancing show that lets people dance while they lose weight.
On April 5, 2010, Oxygen launched its second night of original programming with the fifth season premiere of Tori & Dean: Home Sweet Hollywood.
On January 28, 2011, Oxygen became part of Comcast as part of the buyout agreement by Comcast of NBC Universal from GE.
Read more about this topic: Oxygen (TV Channel)
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