Star Wars is an American epic space opera multimedia franchise created by George Lucas, which began with the eponymous 1977 film and quickly became a worldwide pop culture phenomenon. The franchise has been expanded into various films and other media, including television series, video games, novels, comic books, theme park attractions, and themed areas, comprising an all-encompassing fictional universe. Star Wars is one of the highest-grossing media franchises of all time.
CBS Broadcasting Inc., commonly shortened to CBS (the abbreviation of its former legal name Columbia Broadcasting System), is an American commercial broadcast television and radio network that is the flagship property of the CBS Entertainment Group division of Paramount Global. Headquartered at the CBS Building in New York City, it has major production facilities and operations at the CBS Broadcast Center and the headquarters of owner Paramount at One Astor Plaza (both also in that city) and Television City and the CBS Studio Center in Los Angeles.
Comcast Corporation (formerly known as American Cable Systems and Comcast Holdings), incorporated and headquartered in Philadelphia, is the largest American multinational telecommunications and media conglomerate. The corporation is the second-largest broadcasting and cable television company in the world by revenue (behind AT&T), and is also the largest pay-TV company, the largest cable TV company, and largest home Internet service provider in the United States. Comcast is additionally the nation's third-largest home telephone service provider.
Blu-ray (Blu-ray Disc or BD) is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 2005 and released worldwide on June 20, 2006. It was designed to supersede the DVD format, capable of storing several hours of high-definition video (HDTV 720p and 1080p). The main application of Blu-ray is as a medium for video material such as feature films and for the physical distribution of video games for the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
The original incarnation of Viacom Inc. (derived from "Video & Audio Communications") was an American mass media and entertainment conglomerate based in New York City. It began as CBS Television Film Sales, the broadcast syndication division of the CBS television network in 1952; it was renamed CBS Films in 1958, renamed CBS Enterprises in 1968, renamed Viacom in 1970, and spun off into its own company in 1971. Viacom was a distributor of CBS television series throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and also distributed syndicated television programs.
Broadcast syndication is the practice of leasing the right to broadcasting television shows and radio programs to multiple television stations and radio stations, without going through a broadcast network. It is common in the United States where broadcast programming is scheduled by television networks with local independent affiliates. Syndication is less widespread in the rest of the world, as most countries have centralized networks or television stations without local affiliates.
The Fox Broadcasting Company, commonly known simply as Fox and stylized in all caps, is an American commercial broadcast television network owned by Fox Corporation and headquartered in New York City, with master control operations and additional offices at the Fox Network Center in Los Angeles and the Fox Media Center in Tempe. Launched as a competitor to the Big Three television networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) on October 9, 1986, Fox went on to become the most successful attempt at a fourth television network.
Paramount Global (doing business as Paramount) is an American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate controlled by National Amusements and headquartered at One Astor Plaza in Midtown Manhattan in New York City. The company was formed on December 4, 2019, as ViacomCBS Inc. through the merger of the second incarnations of CBS Corporation and Viacom (which were split from the original Viacom on December 31, 2005). The company changed its name to Paramount Global on February 16, 2022, the day after its Q4 earnings presentation.
The Marx Brothers was an American family comedy act that was successful in vaudeville, on Broadway, and in 14 motion pictures from 1905 to 1949. Five of the Marx Brothers' fourteen feature films were selected by the American Film Institute (AFI) as among the top 100 comedy films, with two of them, Duck Soup (1933) and A Night at the Opera (1935), in the top fifteen. They are widely considered by critics, scholars and fans to be among the greatest and most influential comedians of the 20th century.
A documentary film or documentary is a non-fictional motion-picture intended to "document reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction, education or maintaining a historical record". Bill Nichols has characterized the documentary in terms of "a filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, and mode of audience reception [that remains] a practice without clear boundaries". Early documentary films, originally called "actuality films", lasted one minute or less.
