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As Disney’s story shows, international expansion has afforded media conglomerates key advantages, including access to profitable secondary markets and opportunities to advance and leverage technological innovations. As media technologies have become cheaper and more portable (from the original Walkman to the iPad), American media have proliferated inside and outside U.S. boundaries.

Today, greatly facilitated by the Internet, media products easily flow into the eyes and ears of people around the world. And thanks to satellite transmission, North American and European TV is now available at the global level. Cable services such as CNN and MTV have taken their national acts to the international stage—delivering their content to more than two hundred countries.

This growth of global audiences has permitted companies that lose money on products at home to profit in overseas markets. Roughly 80 percent of American movies, for instance, do not earn back their costs in U.S. theaters; they depend on foreign circulation as well as home video formats to make up for early losses. The same is true for the television industry.