After more than a year appearing twice a week on ABC’s Good Morning America, it probably shouldn’t surprise anyone that Strahan is decamping Disney-ABC’s syndicated Live with Kelly and Michael to head full-time to ABC’s flagship morning show.

Strahan is expected to wrap his run with Live this summer and start full-time at GMA this fall. He’ll continue to serve as an NFL analyst for Fox Sports on the weekends during football season.

Strahan has been at Live for nearly four years, coming on board in September 2012 after the iconic Regis Philbin retired from the program the previous November. Since Strahan’s arrival, ratings for Live have grown significantly, and the program routinely gives top talker, CBS Television Distribution’s Dr. Phil, a run for its money, particularly in weeks when Phil is in repeats and Live is not.

But for parent company Disney, Good Morning America has to be the priority. Morning talk franchises — such as GMA, NBC’s Today and CBS This Morning — tend to be profit centers for networks since they are relatively inexpensive to produce and draw tons of blue-chip advertisers. And GMA has been on the upswing for a while now, routinely leading in viewers and closing the gap with Today among the key demographic of adults 18-49.

Trades and entertainment websites are already talking about replacements for Strahan, although it’s likely that the search hasn’t begun. Close watchers of that show know that when Executive Producer Michael Gelman searches for a new host, he leaves no stone unturned.

That is how Strahan joined the program four years ago: after a thorough ten-month search in which Gelman and crew considered such co-hosts as Jerry O’Connell, Josh Groban and Seth Meyers, Strahan was chosen but only after an audition process that included 20 appearances.

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