• Fortune, Wednesday, February 4, 2009 9:46 AM

In September 2006, Tom Freston fell off the face of the media world when he was abruptly fired as CEO of Viacom. He had built MTV and Nickelodeon into two of the most widely distributed cable networks on earth. Now he has surfaced, helping Oprah Winfrey start a new TV network.

Last June, he signed on as a consultant to Winfrey -- a role that understates his deep involvement in the creation of OWN: the Oprah Winfrey Network. The new cable network, all about the Oprah ethic of living a meaningful life, is supposed to launch in at least 70 million homes early in 2010.

Among the things that drew him in is OWN's distribution deal, which has Discovery converting one of its existing networks, Discovery Health, to the new Oprah channel. "It's taking beach-front real estate and putting a better house on it," Freston says. OWN, he contends, "is as big an idea now as MTV was then. It's the first network about empowerment and life purpose. A great fit for our economic era."

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