Highlights on the Way to a Global Commercial Media Oligopoly: 1990s

-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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DES

The U.S. Data Encryption Standard (= DES) is the most widely used encryption algorithm, especially used for protection of financial transactions. It was developed by IBM in 1971. It is a symmetric-key cryptosystem. The DES algorithm uses a 56-bit encryption key, meaning that there are 72,057,594,037,927,936 possible keys.

for more information see:
http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/3/0,5716,117763+5,00.html
http://www.cryptography.com/des/

http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/3/0...
http://www.cryptography.com/des/
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