"I'm really surprised just because right now there aren't that many great daytime TV shows, or nighttime ones. TV now is so much reality shows and Oprah's one of the last few, you know, good talk show hosts out there, I feel like that's non-comedy," said one Oprah fan.

Winfrey's departure will surely be a blow to the fortunes of broadcast television. says a report available on The New York Times website Friday. Discovery Communications, which will co-own the new channel, announced the creation of OWN 20 months ago. Now Discovery will parlay Winfrey's anticipated exit from broadcast into higher per-subscriber fees and will also seek more lucrative commitments from advertisers.

Winfrey started hosting the show in 1984 when it was known as "A.M. Chicago." A year later it was renamed "The Oprah Winfrey Show."

A year after that, it went into syndication and would go on to become one of the most popular and influential TV talk shows of all time.

It is currently the longest-running daytime television talk show in the United States, having run nationally since September 8,1986, for over 22 seasons and 3,724 episodes November 21, 2008. The show is renewed through 2011, but in a 2007 interview with Larry King, Oprah said that in 2011, she will not renew her contract, thus ending the show.

Oprah has been included in Time magazine's shortlist of the best television series of the 20th century in 1998, and it made the top 50 of TV Guide's countdown of the greatest American shows of all time "dead link" in 2002.