Comment by lubujackson

I remember around 2000 I read about how Ted Turner started his empire: he bought podunk local TV stations that had loose contracts with media owners that allowed them to broadcast shows as often as they wanted, with no restrictions. In the those days, local TV stations were broadcast just like radio and so the assumption was the contract only concerned the audience the TV station's antenna could reach. But the contract didn't specify this. Recognizing the loophole, he bought multiple stations and combined that content into its own cable channel(s) that played old movies and TV shows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Turner This was the basis that allowed him to branch into CNN and more.

When I learned about this, the story was very applicable to me at the time, as my startup had acquired licenses for content that was historically sold directly to libraries by a salesman who would negotiate with each library individually. He used a standard contract. When we contacted the company to license content for display on the internet, they gave us a ridiculous contract with a small one time fee and access to display the content forever. Only after reasoning through their business model and history did we understand how this occurred, which was exactly the same type of gap that Ted Turner had exploited.