As Disney’s story shows, international expansion has allowed media conglomerates some advantages, including secondary markets to earn profits and advance technological innovations. First, as media technologies get cheaper and more portable (think Walkman to iPod), American media proliferate both inside and outside national boundaries. Today, greatly facilitated by the Internet, media products easily reach the eyes and ears of the world. Second, this globalism permits companies that lose money on products at home to profit abroad. Roughly 80 percent of U.S. movies, for instance, do not earn back their costs in U.S. theaters and depend on foreign circulation and home video to make up for losses.

The same is true for the television industry. Consider the 1990s phenomenon Baywatch, which went into first-run syndication in 1991 after being canceled by NBC. The program’s producers claimed that by the late 1990s, Baywatch, a show about the adventures of scantily clad lifeguards who make beaches safer for everyone, was the most-watched program in the world, with more than a billion viewers. The dialogue in the series, like that of action movies, was limited and fairly simple, which made it easy and inexpensive to translate the program into other languages.

In addition, satellite transmission has made North American and European TV available at the global level. Cable services such as CNN and MTV quickly took their national acts to the international stage, and by the twenty-first century CNN and MTV were available in more than two hundred countries. Today, of course, the swapping and streaming of music, TV shows, and movies on the Internet (both legally and illegally) have expanded the global flow of popular culture even further. (See “Media Literacy and the Critical Process: Cultural Imperialism and Movies” about the dominance of the American movie industry.)