From AOL Time Warner to DirecTV and Dish: 20 years of media mergers

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge

This week, DirecTV announced it intends to buy Dish, Sling TV, and the rest of EchoStar's television business for a dollar (while also taking on all of Dish's debt), combining almost 20 million satellite TV subscribers from two companies that have been circling one another for decades.

But it's not just DirecTV and Dish. AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, General Electric, GM, News Corp, Tumblr, and the various incarnations of Time Warner have also gotten mixed up or split up while trying to bridge the gap between communications and media over the years.

Here's a partial timeline of the events that might end with these two companies joining together at last.

AOL, meet Time Warner

At the turn of the 21st century, it was obvious that the internet...

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