Oprah Winfrey, one of the most influential and highly paid women on television, will announce on Friday she is ending her popular daytime talk show in 2011.

Winfrey's production company, Harpo Inc, said on Thursday she would make the official announcement on Friday's live program from Chicago and talk about the reasons behind the decision to end it after 25 years on the air.

She is expected to move to cable network OWN, or Oprah Winfrey Network, a Los Angeles-based joint venture she formed with Discovery Communications Inc, when her current syndication deal for The Oprah Winfrey Show runs out in 2011. OWN will be available in more than 70 million homes.

Harpo declined to comment on whether or when a revised form of the program might appear on OWN, whose launch has been delayed several times since its original 2009 start date.

The Oprah Winfrey Show, broadcast from Chicago on ABC stations across the United States and in more than 140 countries overseas, is one of the TV industry's biggest money-makers. It is the top-rated US daytime talk show, averaging 7.1 million viewers this year.

Winfrey, 55, is considered a major opinion-maker in the United States and this year was No. 45 on Forbes magazine's list of the world's most powerful people.

She publicly promoted Barack Obama during his 2008 presidential campaign and her program became a platform this week for Republican 2008 vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin to launch her book, Going Rogue.

Actor Tom Cruise, the late Michael Jackson, and singer Whitney Houston are among the celebrities to have sat on, jumped on and poured out their hearts on her couch since the program began in 1986.

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