Eileen O’Neill

TV Real, July 9, 2008

President and General Manager

Planet Green

With climate change and other eco-related issues at the forefront of cultural dialogue, Discovery Communications, driven by its president and CEO, David Zaslav, set out to address the needs of consumers who are embracing all things green and bringing these practices into the home. The decision was made last spring to launch a dedicated green channel that would offer up eco content 24 hours a day, with equal parts of education and entertainment, and so began the re-branding of Discovery Home into Planet Green.

The new channel debuted on June 4, led by Eileen O’Neill as its president and general manager. Right out of the gate, a host of big-name talent signed on to get involved, from celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse, who will tape his new cookery series Emeril Green in a Whole Foods Market, to Adrian Grenier of HBO’s Entourage with Alter Eco, which follows him and his “Green Team” helping people take small steps to live more environmentally friendly lifestyles. Leonardo DiCaprio’s 13-part docu-series Greensburg, following the environment-conscious rebuilding of a Kansas town that was destroyed by a tornado, is also set to be a top performer on the new network.

“We wanted to focus on having talent or experts in real voices,” says O’Neill of the network’s impressive star roster. “This is a really passion-oriented channel, so we steered clear of more ‘voice of god’ content and put faces to our [programs].” Other famous faces on Planet Green include ABC News anchor Bob Woodruff, who will be providing a weekly eco-newscast, Focus Earth with Bob Woodruff, and Hollywood correspondent Maria Menounos, delivering the latest news about stars who are making headlines by embracing eco-lifestyles in Hollywood Green.

“From Hollywood to New York to the plains of Kansas with Greensburg, what’s been very rewarding about this is both the internal support for the channel and the marketplace support, whether it’s talent, businesses, advertisers and even some competitors,” says O’Neill. “It’s nice goodwill to be supported.”

For now, the 24/7 channel has launched exclusively in the U.S., however Planet Green programming blocks are available on a host of Discovery’s international feeds. Latin America, for example, debuted its Planet Green block last fall, while Asia launched a raft of Planet Green programming in March. O’Neill points out that as the channel “builds its inventory, networks around the world will have the opportunity to partner with us on the content.” As far as a global rollout for Planet Green, O’Neill says they will “see how things develop.”

With the network now up and running, and new series slated to launch throughout the year, O’Neill is at the point with Planet Green where she’s “excited to be on the air,” and recognizes that “now it’s the business of running a channel, which I think Discovery is pretty good at,” she quips.

O’Neill quite literally “grew up Discovery,” having joined the company some 17 years ago as an unpaid intern and rising through the ranks to assume her former role as the president and general manager of Discovery Health and FitTV. “Discovery was one channel when I started here,” she recalls. “It’s a great opportunity to evolve a career and learn in an environment that always cared about the environment.”

The fact that her current position encompasses a variety of different areas only adds to what O’Neill loves about the ever-expanding learning process that comes with heading up a network. “The word ‘general’ is absolutely correct in the general manager title,” she jokes, “you have to know a lot about everything, and that’s rewarding.”

—By Kristin Brzoznowski