The setting is the fifty-second floor of 1515 Broadway, Viacom's headquarters in the middle of Manhattan's Times Square, the Gold Coast of the communications world. The view from a wall-length window dramatically displays the recent transformation of the streets below from crack-and-hooker haven to media-entertainment theme park. The late spring afternoon is bright, blue, clear and cloudless. Just west of "The Deuce," the fabled Forty-Second Street, stretches the Hudson River and, to its west, the rest of America and the world, as in the famed Saul Steinberg cover from the New Yorker. Only, from this particular aerie, that of Viacom's chairman and CEO Sumner Redstone, the rest of the world looks largely like billions of consumers of America's bottomless pit of pop culture.

At a time when "content is king," Sumner Redstone wants to be King of Content — and to a large extent he has succeeded. Once just the owner of a chain of movie theaters, he's now a global-media mogul, a match for his friend and competitor Rupert Murdoch. Redstone has pieced together an entertainment behemoth that, after the merger with CBS, will become perhaps the largest diversified entertainment company in the world, with revenues second only to AOL/Time Warner, according to The Washington Post. The empire encompasses Paramount Pictures, Simon & Schuster, MTV, Showtime, Nickelodeon, Blockbuster Video, SonicNet and many other brand names.

Redstone was raised in Boston's West End in a tenement with no bathroom, the first-born of Michael Rothstein, who sold newspapers and linoleum before getting into the nightclub business. After opening the first drive-in movie theater in the United States, Rothstein built a small chain that began flourishing just after World War II. His son Sumner attended Boston Latin School, the city's prestigious public exam school. Smart, competitive, and tenacious, he graduated first in his class. "I've always had that obsessive will to win and a commitment to excellence, which I believe was really imbued in me — if at any place outside of one's genes — in Boston Latin," Redstone says.

At the age of 17, Redstone entered Harvard. When he graduated a short two and a half years later in 1944, he had become fluent in Japanese and was selected by Harvard Japanese-history professor Edwin Reischauer to join an elite U.S. Army team charged with cracking secret Japanese military and diplomatic communication codes. In 1947, Redstone graduated from Harvard Law and married Phyllis Raphael. One of his law professors, Archibald Cox, later of Watergate fame, arranged a U.S. Court of Appeals clerkship, after which Redstone served as special assistant to U.S. Attorney General Tom C. Clark. In 1951, at just 28 and on the fast track to success, Redstone became a partner in a Washington law firm, Ford, Bergson, Adams, Borkland & Redstone. But he soon became restless and returned to Massachusetts to join National Amusements, his family's movie-exhibition business.

As National Amusements grew, Redstone became wealthy and achieved prominence within the motion picture industry and in his hometown. Still mindful of the social ramifications inherent to his early work, Redstone co-chaired Ed Muskie's bid for president in 1972. By the mid-eighties, however, he began to feel that he had wasted the preceding three decades. "I have a sense that I should have done better, that I should have done something more meaningful," he told one interviewer then. "It doesn't make much difference to the world whether we have 300 theaters or 400 or 500."

Finally, in 1987, Redstone saw his chance to come out of hibernation. Then 63 and head of his successful, but sedate, family company, Redstone thought that by purchasing Viacom, then a sleepy television company, he could become a key player in the rapidly growing media and entertainment industry. "I really didn't understand it then," Redstone admits. "I knew very little about television, I knew very little about cable, cable programming. But my instincts were right."

He was convinced that "the rapid proliferation of new outlets for content" would fuel what he and few others foresaw: "a ravenous global appetite for entertainment and information." Adds Redstone: "I saw Viacom as the future, on the cutting edge of the explosion that was going to take place in the world of entertainment television — in a way, the opposite of motion pictures exhibition."

And so, he decided, as he puts it, to "risk it all, to bet my life." After launching a highly leveraged — and highly controversial — $3.4 billion takeover of Viacom, he proceeded over the next decade to build, borrow, and buy it into what he now proudly calls "one of the three or four great media companies in the world."

"I knew it — that's all," Redstone explains. "What can I say? At the time we acquired Viacom, everyone said I'd overpaid. But even at today's depressed prices, that investment is worth billions. Everyone was saying MTV was a fad. I knew better. Do you know that the banks that loaned the money were trying to insist that we sell — of all things — MTV Networks? I said no chance! Nickelodeon was barely making it in those days. In this short 10 years, Nickelodeon has become the number one channel in the entire cable universe — So obviously I was on the right track.

"I saw the consolidation of power taking place in the media industry," he adds. "This global race will go to the swift and the strong. And Viacom, as we have repeatedly demonstrated, is among the swiftest of the strongest."

In March 1987, when the Viacom deal was done, Redstone controlled 83 percent of what he began calling the "most diversified electronic media company in the world." Through Viacom International Inc. and National Amusements, Redstone owned the largest producer of programs for cable television subscribers; he owned Showtime/the Movie Channel, the pay television movie systems; MTV, the rock music channel; five network-affiliated television stations; syndication rights for The Cosby Show, one of history's most successful programs; and his movie-theater chain which now housed 1,300 screens. Viacom, Redstone told reporters, was "a sleeping giant about to explode."

In the years that followed, Viacom, as Redstone had predicted, began to expand, with cable television, program syndication, broadcasting, and entertainment programming all proving to be among the fastest-growing and most exportable parts of America's economy.

Redstone's own net worth soared as well. In the year after his acquisition of the company, his stock tripled in value to $1.25 billion. Coupled with his other holdings, his family's net worth reached nearly $2 billion. (Forbes estimated Redstone's worth at $6.4 billion in 1999.) This fortune — now tied for the first time to Viacom's public market capitalization — also pushed Redstone into that lofty sphere inhabited by only a few other highly publicized fellow media makers, such as CNN founder Ted Turner, CBS president Lawrence Tisch and Rupert Murdoch of News Corp. Sumner Redstone had achieved all this practically overnight. But there was still something missing.

Redstone's hard-fought and controversial purchases of Paramount Communications and Blockbuster Video in 1994 cemented Viacom's status as a top-tier media company. If Redstone seems optimistic, it is because he sees Viacom's future in supplying the growing demand for American pop culture from newly emerging global markets. "Take, for example, the studio business," he says. "When you see "Mission Impossible" doing $180 million in the United States and $250 million overseas, you see the growth that takes place overseas. Or let me give it to you from an exhibitor's standpoint. National Amusements is building right now in Chile and Argentina. Would you believe that there is only one five-screen multiplex in all of South America? There's an insatiable demand for American product, American entertainment and, indeed, information all over the world. The growth that's going to take place in the future is going to be far more overseas than here."

And to fuel that demand, Redstone still has his vast empire: Paramount, MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, Showtime, Comedy Central, USA, 50 percent of UPN, complete ownership of 11 television stations, publishing house Simon & Schuster, and, of course, thousands of home-video retail stores and 1,300 movie screens. The drop in Viacom's stock notwithstanding, Redstone's personal stake in his company — some $500 million in 1987, and once valued at $6 billion — is still worth a cool $3 billion.

And he feels like a million dollars — or rather $3 billion — too. "My resting heart rate is 55, which is an athlete's," he boasts. "My blood pressure is 117 over 70 ... I work harder than I ever have in my life. I have the same commitment, the same love and passion for Viacom, the same determination to reward the people who may be disappointed now, who have invested in Viacom."

To those who remain concerned about the high-stakes gambles he has taken, he says, "One doesn't accept bad challenges. Part of it is always the risk-taking without seeing that the risks are rational and the rewards are commensurate — are more than commensurate — with the risks."

Those guiding principles, he asserts, are what distinguishes him from his rival, Rupert Murdoch. "I wouldn't take the risks he takes," Redstone says, "and I'm a risk taker."

Given the Blockbuster debacle and Viacom's enormous debt, many analysts would argue that Redstone has not followed his own best advice. His original purchase of Viacom in 1987 was brilliant, they say, but his acquisition of Blockbuster will never be thought of as a bargain. On the other hand, Sumner Redstone didn't get where he is today by listening to Wall Street analysts. Unshakable as ever, he insists, "The one thing I wouldn't do is risk Viacom. I will tell you: I'm not going back to where I was."

AS THE MEDIA WATCH THE WORLD, WE WATCH THE MEDIA.

The Media Channel is a not-for-profit project of OneWorld Online and The Global Center, and is produced by Globalvision New Media.