Under pressure from technology giants such as Amazon, Apple and Netflix, and the prospect of big traditional players getting bigger — from Walt Disney’s $66bn bid for most of Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox, to AT&T’s pending purchase of Time Warner — media companies are reaching one conclusion: eat or be eaten.

The revelation that Mr Murdoch was seeking an exit from the entertainment business injected a new sense of urgency among smaller media companies — including CBS and Viacom, which last week decided to revisit a combination, having walked away from such a deal just over a year ago.

“It’s clear that the message that Disney and Fox are sending is that scale matters,” Lowell McAdam, Verizon’s chief executive, told analysts on the telecoms company’s earnings call last month. Verizon has been pegged as a potential buyer of assets from Fox to Charter, the cable provider. But it is not only scale that is driving what is shaping up to be one of the busiest media dealmaking cycles in recent history.

The rise of streaming video from pioneers such as Netflix and Amazon has upended television, eroding audiences and sapping advertising revenue. As the industry grapples with changing viewer habits, big distributors are consolidating and acquiring content owners, leaving TV network owners like CBS and Viacom — which were housed under the same roof from 2000 to 2006 — exposed. “Companies in the middle risk getting squeezed in their economics by the very large guys unless they can figure out their comparative advantage,” says one senior New York banker.

The industry has been undergoing a tectonic shift for some time. AT&T, best known as a wireless operator, first signalled its ambitions to scale up in media with its $48.5bn purchase of satellite operator DirecTV in 2014. Two years later, it made an even bigger bet by proposing to buy Time Warner, the owner of HBO, CNN and the Warner Bros film studio, for $85.4bn. The Trump administration has sued to block that deal on antitrust grounds and the case is headed for trial in March.

Other smaller players have also made moves, from Discovery Communications snapping up Scripps Networks Interactive, owner of the Food Network, for $14.6bn to film studio Lionsgate spending $4.4bn on premium cable channel Starz. Speculation has also swirled around AMC Networks, the company behind hit shows including The Walking Dead and Mad Men. Dealbreaker: opposition from CBS chief Les Moonves reportedly caused talks of a Viacom tie-up to collapse © Reuters CBS and Viacom last explored a deal in late 2016, when the Redstone family — which holds controlling stakes in both companies — urged them to consider a merger to “respond even more aggressively and effectively to the challenges of the changing entertainment and media landscape”.

But discussions fell apart after it became apparent that Les Moonves, chief executive of CBS, opposed the combination, say people briefed on the matter. The two companies’ fortunes have diverged in the years since they split in 2006. Viacom’s cable networks, including MTV and Nickelodeon, have been particularly hard hit, and the company is in the midst of restructuring following a messy struggle for control that led to a management shake-up in 2016. CBS, on the other hand, has the US’s most-watched broadcast channel and has sought new sources of revenue by offering its streaming service