MTV
MTV is an American cable television channel and the flagship namesake property of the MTV Entertainment Group, a sub-division of the Paramount Media Networks division of Paramount Skydance. Launched on August 1, 1981, the channel originally aired music videos and related music entertainment programming guided by television personalities known as video jockeys. MTV soon began establishing its presence overseas, eventually gaining an unprecedented cult following and becoming one of the major factors in cable programming's rise to fame, leading American corporations to dominate the television economy in the 1990s.
In the years since its inception, the channel significantly toned down its focus on music in favor of original reality programming for teenagers and young adults., MTV is available to approximately 67 million pay television households in the United States, down from its 2011 peak of 99 million households.
History
MTV was launched on August 1, 1981, at 12:01 a.m., under the ownership of Warner-Amex Satellite Entertainment. The first video played on MTV was “Video Killed the Radio Star” by The Buggles. On June 25, 1984, Warner Communications spun-off Nickelodeon and MTV into a new public corporation called MTV Networks. Warner would later acquire American Express' 50% stake the following year. From August 27, 1985, to May 20, 1986, Warner would sell 31%, and later, 69% of MTV Networks to Viacom.Programming
As MTV expanded, music videos and VJ-guided programming were no longer the centerpiece of its programming. The channel's programming has covered a wide variety of genres and formats aimed at adolescents and young adults. In addition to its original programming, MTV has also aired original and syndicated programs from Paramount-owned siblings and third-party networks.MTV is also a producer of films aimed at young adults through its production label, MTV Films, and has aired both its own theatrically released films and original made-for-television movies from MTV Studios in addition to acquired films.
In 2010, a study by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation found that of 207.5 hours of prime time programming on MTV, 42% included content reflecting the lives of gay, bisexual, and transgender people. This was the highest in the industry and the highest percentage ever.
In 2018, MTV launched a new production unit under the MTV Studios name focused on producing new versions of MTV's library shows. It was later consolidated into MTV Entertainment Studios
Video Music Awards
In 1984, the channel produced its first MTV Video Music Awards show, or VMAs. The first award show, in 1984, was punctuated by a live performance by Madonna of "Like a Virgin". The statuettes that are handed out at the Video Music Awards are of the MTV moon-man, the channel's original image from its first broadcast in 1981., the Video Music Awards were MTV's most watched annual event.Special, annual events
MTV began its annual Spring Break coverage in 1986, setting up temporary operations in Daytona Beach, Florida, for a week in March, broadcasting live 8 hours per day. "Spring break is a youth culture event", MTV's vice president Doug Herzog said at the time. "We wanted to be part of it for that reason. It makes good sense for us to come down and go live from the center of it, because obviously the people there are the kinds of people who watch MTV."The channel later expanded its beach-themed events to the summer, dedicating most of each summer season to broadcasting live from a beach house at different locations away from New York City, eventually leading to channel-wide branding throughout the summer in the 1990s and early 2000s such as Motel California, Summer Share, Isle of MTV, SoCal Summer, Summer in the Keys, and Shore Thing. MTV VJs would host blocks of music videos, interview artists and bands, and introduce live performances and other programs from the beach house location each summer.
MTV also held week-long music events that took over the presentation of the channel. Examples from the 1990s and 2000s include All Access Week, a week in the summer dedicated to live concerts and festivals; Spankin' New Music Week, a week in the fall dedicated to brand new music videos; and week-long specials that culminated in a particular live event, such as Wanna be a VJ and the Video Music Awards.
At the end of each year, MTV takes advantage of its home location in New York City to broadcast live coverage on New Year's Eve in Times Square. Several live music performances are featured alongside interviews with artists and bands that were influential throughout the year. For many years from the 1980s to the 2000s, the channel upheld a tradition of having a band perform a cover song at midnight immediately following the beginning of the new year.
Live concert broadcasts
Throughout its history, MTV has covered global benefit concert series live. For most of July 13, 1985, MTV showed the Live Aid concerts, held in London and Philadelphia and organized by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure to raise funds for famine relief in Ethiopia. While the ABC network showed only selected highlights during prime-time, MTV broadcast 16 hours of coverage.Along with VH1, MTV broadcast the Live 8 concerts, a series of concerts set in the G8 states and South Africa, on July 2, 2005. Live 8 preceded the 31st G8 summit and the 20th anniversary of Live Aid. MTV drew heavy criticism for its coverage of Live 8. The network cut to commercials, VJ commentary, or other performances during performances. Complaints surfaced on the Internet over MTV interrupting the reunion of Pink Floyd. In response, MTV president Van Toffler stated that he wanted to broadcast highlights from every venue of Live 8 on MTV and VH1, and clarified that network hosts talked over performances only in transition to commercials, informative segments or other musical performances. Toffler acknowledged that "MTV should not have placed such a high priority on showing so many acts, at the expense of airing complete sets by key artists." He also blamed the Pink Floyd interruption on a mandatory cable affiliate break. MTV averaged 1.4 million viewers for its original July 2 broadcast of Live 8. Consequently, MTV and VH1 aired five hours of uninterrupted Live 8 coverage on July 9, with each channel airing other blocks of artists.
Logo and branding
MTV's logo was designed in 1981 by Manhattan Design under the guidance of original creative director Fred Seibert. The block letter "M" was sketched by Rogoff, with the scribbled word "TV" spraypainted by Olinksky. The primary variant of MTV's logo at the time had the "M" in yellow and the "TV" in red. However, unlike most television networks' logos at the time, the logo was constantly branded with different colors, patterns, and images on a variety of station IDs. Examples include 1988's ID "Adam And Eve", where the "M" is an apple and the snake is the "TV". And for 1984's ID "Art History", the logo is shown in different art styles. The only constant aspects of MTV's logo at the time were its general shape and proportions, with everything else being dynamic.MTV launched on August 1, 1981, with an extended network ID featuring the first landing on the Moon, which was a concept of Seibert's executed by Buzz Potamkin and Perpetual Motion Pictures. The ID then cut to the American flag planted on the Moon's surface changed to show the MTV logo on it, which rapidly changed into different colors and patterns several times per second as the network's original guitar-driven jingle was played for the first time. After MTV's launch, the "Moon landing" ID was edited to show only its ending, and was shown at the top of every hour until early 1986, when the ID was scrapped in light of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. The ID ran "more than 75,000 times each year, at the top and bottom of every hour every day" according to Seibert.
From the late 1990s to the early 2000s, MTV updated its on-air appearance at the beginning of every year and each summer, creating a consistent brand across all of its music-related shows. This style of channel-wide branding came to an end as MTV drastically reduced its number of music-related shows in the early to mid-2000s. Around this time, MTV introduced a static and single color digital on-screen graphic mainly grey during on-air and some color to be shown during all of its programming.
Starting with the premiere of the short-lived program FNMTV: Friday Night MTV in 2008, MTV started using an updated and cropped version of its original logo for 30 years during most of its on-air programming. It became MTV's official logo on February 8, 2010, and officially debuted on its website. The channel's full text "MUSIC TELEVISION" was eliminated, with the revised and chopped down on the logo largely the same as the original logo, but without the initialism, the bottom of the "M" being cropped and the "V" in "TV" no longer branching off. This change was most likely made to reflect MTV's more prominent focus on reality and comedy programming and less on music-related programming. However, much like the original logo, the new logo was designed to be filled in with a seemingly unlimited variety of images. It is used worldwide, but not everywhere is it used existentially. The new logo was first used on MTV Films logo with the 2010 film Jackass 3D. MTV's rebranding was overseen by Popkern.
On June 25, 2015, MTV International rebranded its on-air look with a new vaporwave and seapunk-inspired graphics package. It included a series of new station IDs featuring 3D renderings of objects and people, much akin to vaporwave and seapunk "aesthetics". Many have derided MTV's choice of rebranding, insisting that the artistic style was centered on denouncing corporate capitalism rather than being embraced by major corporations like MTV. Many have also suggested that MTV made an attempt to be relevant in the modern entertainment world with the rebrand. In addition to this, the rebrand was made on exactly the same day that the social media site Tumblr introduced Tumblr TV, an animated GIF viewer which featured branding inspired by MTV's original 1980s on-air look. Tumblr has been cited as a prominent location of aesthetic art, and thus many have suggested MTV and Tumblr "switched identities". The rebrand also incorporated a modified version of MTV's classic "I Want My MTV!" slogan, changed to read "I Am My MTV." Vice has suggested that the slogan change represents "the current generation's movement towards self-examination, identity politics and apparent narcissism." MTV also introduced MTV Bump, a website that allows Instagram and Vine users to submit videos to be aired during commercial breaks, as well as MTV Canvas, an online program where users submit custom IDs to also be aired during commercial breaks.
On February 5, 2021, MTV began to use a revised logo in tandem with the 2010 version, doing away with the 3D effect inherited from its predecessors. That logo is revealed to be an alternate variant of the current logo designed by the design agency Loyalkaspar, which pays homage to MTV of the past with the red-yellow-blue color combination and the 3D effect mainly inherited from its predecessor logo. The new logo's rollout was completed in time for the 2021 MTV Video Music Awards.