AI and the Recentralization of the Global Media Economy: Beyond Disruption

At an inflection point when artificial intelligence is becoming media infrastructure, this volume offers a system-level analysis of value chains, organizational architectures, and economic rationales. Drawing on economic theory and industry observation, Zvezdan Vukanovic interrogates platform governance, strategic conduct, technological deployment, and regulatory design to explain how AI is reconfiguring production, distribution, monetization, and audience engagement. Across seven sections, he reconstructs adoption trajectories and specifies consequences for cost structures, capital allocation, revenue logics, and scale economies. He charts advertising's shift from efficiency to algorithmic allocation, automated trading, and programmatic markets within a platform-centric, data-intensive ecosystem. Chapters examine automated journalism, neural dubbing, streaming optimization, OTT personalization, and AI-enabled television, alongside their ethical and regulatory dilemmas. The book argues that AI intensifies recentralization and reintermediation through closed platforms, enabling conglomerates to exploit data and compute advantages, manage antitrust constraints, and govern fragmentation. It closes with one hundred questions for researchers to explore.