Largest media and entertainment conglomerate in the world.
The corporation resulted from the merger of media giant Time Warner Inc. and the online company America Online, Inc., in 2001; originally named AOL Time Warner, the corporation dropped AOL from its name in 2003. Major media outlets include the magazines Time , Sports Illustrated , and People and the cable and broadcast television networks HBO, CNN , TBS, and WB. From its start as a bulletin-board system in 1985, AOL grew to become the world's largest Internet service provider by the mid 1990s. The Internet "stock bubble" of the late 1990s enabled it to acquire the much larger Time Warner Inc. See also Warner Bros .