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MTV, originally an initialism of Music Television, is an American cable television channel that launched on August 1, 1981 by Warner Communications. It is currently owned by Paramount Global, and is one of the company's flagship brands. MTV's original focus was on music-related programming, including blocks of music videos.
MTV (originally an initialism of Mummy Television) is an inanimate cable television channel. It was officially launched on November 11,2001. Based in newest Newport it serves as the flagship property of the MTV Entertainment Group, part of Paramount Media Networks, a division of Paramount Global. The channel originally aired music videos and ...
Aug 2, 2021 · MTV forged new paths in entertainment by serving third-party produced content like music videos to a wide audience, paving the way for platforms like Netflix, pushing forward formats like reality...
- Adam Behr
Nov 6, 2011 · It's hard to remember now, but MTV did once play music videos all day. A new oral history recalls that golden age, and the network's meteoric rise to the top of the music industry.
- MTV’s Co-Founder Uttered The Network’s First Words.
- Neil Armstrong Wasn’T on Board with Being Quoted in MTV’s Promotional Materials.
- MTV Nearly Wasn’T called MTV.
- MTV’s Logo Was Nearly Different, too.
- MTV Had A Questionable Casting Strategy.
- There Was A Big Dispute Over The First Song Played on MTV.
- Most of America Couldn’T Watch MTV When It Initially Launched.
- Rod Stewart Was The Most-Played Artist During The Early Days of MTV.
- Several Record Companies Hated The Very Idea of MTV.
- MTV only Had A Small Library of Music Videos.
“Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll.” These were the simple but effective first words ever uttered on MTV. And they were delivered against a backdrop of another major launch—the Columbia Space Shuttle from earlier in the year—by one of the network’s key players. Chief operating officer John Lack, who’d previously overseen the similarly pioneering ...
MTV had planned to accompany its stock footage of the famous Apollo 11 moon landing with Neil Armstrong’s iconic quote, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” And they were banking on the astronaut being too apathetic to deny them permission. In Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum’s exhaustive oral history book,I Want My MTV: The Uncensor...
MTV could have avoided all the jokes about music television with no music if the network had been able to stick to its original name. Pittman had wanted to christen the exciting rock and roll revolution as the very unexciting TV-1. In what proved to be a blessing in disguise, his legal team discovered that another unimaginative business had already...
The creative juices didn’t appear to be flowing in the run-up to MTV’s launch. Alongside the attempt to brand the station the rather dull-sounding TV-1, producers were also thinking of adopting a run-of-the-mill logo akin to the likes of NBC and ABC. It was only when Manhattan Design, a hip New York graphic design collective, came on board that the...
It seems fair to say that network executive Pittman wasn’t the most PC of bosses. In fact, his casting strategy would today be considered something of an HR nightmare. InI Want My MTV, Pittman freely admitsthat he selected the station’s VJs primarily for their appearance: “We need a Black person, we need a girl next door, we need a little sexy sire...
The Buggles’s “Video Killed the Radio Star” seems like a no-brainer to kick off a station playing nonstop music videos. But program director Steve Casey claimed that he faced pushback from other creatives about the network’s first-ever promo. Although it reached number one in the band’s UK homeland, the track only peaked at No. 40 on this side of t...
Although the birth of MTV is widely regarded as one of the most important pop-culture developments of the 1980s, the majority of Americans didn’t even have the ability to witness it. That's because the moment that The Buggles’s “Video Killed the Radio Star” helped to kickstart the music video revolution could only be seen by New Jersey residentswho...
So everyone knows that The Buggles were the first act to be played on MTV. But what about the launch date’s other milestones? Well, Pat Benatar’s “You Better Run” was the first female-fronted promo to air; REO Speedwagon’s “Take It on the Run” was the first bit of concert footage screened, while their track “Keep On Loving You” was the first U.S. H...
“If you had said to someone in 1981, ‘Do you want to watch a music video?’ the person would have said, ‘I don't know what you’re talking about,’ because the phrase didn’t actually exist,” Tannenbaum told NPR 30 years after MTV launched. Perhaps little wonder, therefore, that several record companies couldn’t quite grasp how the station would benefi...
If you managed to stay awake long enough to watch MTV’s first 24 hours of existence, you’d have experienced several cases of déjà vu. Due to both the resistance of various record companies and the fact that the medium was still in its infancy, the network only had a small libraryof videos at its disposal—reportedly just 250. Nearly half that tally ...
- Jon O'brien
Jun 15, 2024 · We were seated in his home office, in Santa Monica, in the beautiful mansion that “The Real World”—which ran for thirty-three seasons, and spawned multiple spinoffs—had built for him and...
4 days ago · Before long, game shows, reality shows, animated cartoons, and soap operas began to appear in the MTV lineup, and the network shifted its focus from music to youth-oriented pop culture. By the mid-1990s, the majority of MTV’s daily schedule was devoted to programming that was not related to music.
