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Vote: | Success is not built on success. It's built on failure. It's built on frustration. Sometimes its built on catastrophe. |
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Vote: | Viacom's results for the first quarter put the company on a fast track for another record year in 2004. |
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Biography
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Sumner M. Redstone (born May 27, 1923) is Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of Viacom. He was born Sumner Murray Rothstein, is Jewish, and grew up in Boston, Massachusetts.
He attended the prestigious Boston Latin school and graduated at the top of his class, which won him a position at Harvard College. He completed his B.A. in three years when the Board of Overseers of Harvard conferred him his degree. Afterward, Redstone served in World War II, decoding Japanese messages for the United States Army. Upon completion of his Army service, he worked in Washington, D.C. and attended Georgetown University Law School. He chose to transfer into Harvard Law School and received his LL.B from that institution.
After completing law school, Redstone working primarily in Washington, D.C., working at first for the U.S. Department of Justice in San Francisco and then going into private practice. However, after a few years in practice, he chose to join his father's theater chain management operation, what is now known as National Amusements.
As Redstone grew National Amusements, he believed that content would become more important than distribution mechanisms. There would always exist channels of distribution (albeit in varied forms), but content was always going to be necessary (his famous quote is "content is king!"). He then made investments in Columbia Pictures, Twentieth-Century Fox, Orion Pictures, and Paramount Pictures, all of which turned over huge profits when he chose to sell the stock in the early 1980s.
Viacom Looking for a new business to develop, he set his sights on Viacom International, a company that was a spin-off of CBS in 1971 after the FCC ruled that television networks could not syndicate programs they produced. Viacom syndicated most of CBS's programs, but also made a lot of money from syndicating other programs, including most of Carsey-Werner Productions' shows (The Cosby Show, Roseanne, and A Different World), as well as syndicating shows for other companies (Columbia Pictures Television's All In The Family was one notable example). Viacom also owned MTV Networks (formerly known as Warner-AMEX Satellite Entertainment), which owned MTV and Nickelodeon. In addition, other included properties included Showtime Networks (a similar pay-television network to HBO and Cinemax) and The Movie Channel. Viacom acquired MTV Networks in 1985 for $550 million from Steve Ross' Warner Communications (WCI bought American Express' share and then sold the entire entity to Viacom, as they felt that they could not make a lot of money from the venture and the bias that a studio owning cable channels would be a conflict of interest, which would change when Time Warner bought Turner Broadcasting in 1995).
After a hostile takeover in 1987, Redstone won voting control of Viacom and led a series of acquisitions to make Viacom one of the top players in modern media (aside from General Electric's NBC-Universal, News Corporation (parent of Fox), Time Warner, Sony, and Disney).
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Sumner Redstone".
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