-1994
Viacom multimedia and industrial corporation takes control of Paramount Communications for US$ 9.6 billion, as well as Blockbuster Entertainment, a huge video store chain, for US$ 8.4. billion.
1995
Entertainment giant Disney buys Capital Cities-ABC for US$ 19 billion.
The industrial and broadcasting company Westinghouse Corp. buys out CBS for US$ 5.4 billion.
In a US$ 7.2 billion deal, Time Warner acquires Turner Communications, owner of prime cable TV channels CNN, TBS and TNT and a major classic American film library.
1996
Westinghouse/CBS buys Infinity Broadcasting's large group of radio stations.
Murdoch and News Corp. acquire ten more TV stations and TV production studios with the US$ 2.5 billion purchase of New World Communications Group.
Viacom buys half of UPN-TV network, adding that to its other holdings, which include eleven TV stations, along with MTV, VH-1, and other cable TV channels and Paramount movie studios.
1997
Radio Groups Chancellor Media and Evergreen merge and are linked by ownership with Capstar Broadcasting; they also buy ten radio stations from Viacom. By mid-1997 Chancellor/Capstar controls no fewer than 325 radio stations around the United States.
Chancellor/Capstar's controlling ownership group, Hicks Muse Tate & Furst, buys the seventh largest radio group, SFX, adding another seventy-two radio stations, making a total of nearly four hundred stations controlled by this one source.
Westinghouse-CBS buys out American Radio Systems, the fourth largest radio chain in total audience, which gives Westinghouse-CBS over 170 radio stations with a total audience nearly equal to that of the Chancellor/Capstar group.
Giant European-based print and electronic publishing and data base corporations Reed Elsevier and Wolters Kluwer merge.
1998
Bertelsmann buys the Random House-Alfred A. Knopf-Crown Publishing group of book publishers from Newhouse/Advance Publications, adding to its Bantam-Doubleday-Dell publishing group and giving Bertelsmann by far the largest English-language publishing operations.
1999
AOL, the worlds leading Internet service provider and Time Warner, the worlds leading classical media company merge in a US$ 243.3 billion deal.
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Although the traditional media companies first steps into the digital sphere were fairly clumsy, they have quickly learned from their mistakes and continued to enlarge their Internet presence.
During the last years many of the smaller players in the field of digital media have been driven out of competition by the huge media conglomerates. This mainly is a result of the advantages that the commercial media giants have over their less powerful counterparts:
- As engagement in online activities mostly does not lead to quick profits, investors must be able to take losses, which only powerful companies are able to.
- Traditional media outlets usually have huge stocks of digital programming, which they can easily plug into the Internet at little extra cost.
- To generate audience, the big media conglomerates constantly promote their Websites and other digital media products on their traditional media holdings.
- As possessors of the hottest "brands" commercial media companies often get premier locations from browser software makers, Internet service providers, search engines and portals.
- Having the financial resources at their disposition the big media firms are aggressive investors in start-up Internet media companies.
Commercial media companies have close and long ties to advertisers, which enables them to seize most of these revenues.
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Regarding the dimension of their financial and human resources commercial media companies are at any rate much more powerful players than their independent counterparts. Still those reply with an extreme multiplicity and diversity. Today thousands of newsgroups, mailing-list and e-zines covering a wide range of issues from the environment to politics, social and human rights, culture, art and democracy are run by alternative groups.
Moreover independent content provider have started to use digital media for communication, information and co-ordination long before they were discovered by corporate interest. They regularly use the Internet and other networks to further public discourse and put up civic resistance. And in many cases are very successful with their work, as initiatives like widerst@ndMUND's (AT) co-ordination of the critics of the participation of the Freedom Party in the Austrian government via mailing-lists, an online-magazine and discussion forums, show.
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Ronald L. Rivest is Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in MIT's EECS Department. He was one of three persons in a team to invent the
Copyright laws generally provide for three kinds of neighboring rights: 1) the rights of performing artists in their performances, 2) the rights of producers of phonograms in their phonograms, and 3) the rights of broadcasting organizations in their radio and television programs. Neighboring rights attempt to protect those who assist intellectual creators to communicate their message and to disseminate their works to the public at large.
Authors of copyrighted works (besides