At 5am Central time, MTV and VH-1 Classic (I think it’s also called MTV2) will air the first hour of MTV as it was broadcasted 35 years ago today.
It will air several more times on VH-1 Classic; check your local listings.
Didn’t they play music back then?
Yes, and that was why it was called Music Television, and Video Hits One.
I remember in 2006, MTV repeated their entire first 24 hours in honor of their 25th anniversary.
I’ve long lobbied for a channel called MTV Reset, where they just start the channel completely over, commercials and all. Do ads in a banner across the bottom of the screen or something. An anniversary like this one would have been the perfect time to start.
“Video killed the radio star. Video killed… .”
" ‘The Real World’ killed the video star…"
To a certain extent YouTube killed the MTV that showed music videos. Why should I sit through a long series of videos I don’t care about to see the one I do, when I can just go to YouTube and see whatever I like.
I wonder why the beginning of MTV managed to become iconic, where everyone knows what the first video played was, and once I stumbled upon a playlist on youtube of the first videos preceded by whatever it was they said before playing the first one, but no one cares (so far as I know) about the beginning of other stations/networks/channels. I’m sure the development of early networks like NBC were often gradual processes with little video still available, but that could be different for fox or any of a thousand other cable stations.
Their mistake in this regard was being unable to show you the videos that you want to see when you didn’t realize that you wanted to see them. Beavis and Butthead did this, I guess, and Rob Zombie got a huge rub from that, but most of the rest was “show the popular stuff everyone wants to see” which became unsustainable. They probably could have shown more concerts too, but I guess that wasn’t very popular.
It’s MTV Classic here and will be on in less than 10 minutes. Got my DVR set. 
Some of us oldies are used to seeing videos on a real screen, not on a tiny phone or tablet or web page. It’s amazing what shows up in the background sometimes.
Plus there was the concept of “serendipity” when watching the original MTV. It was fun seeing what might come up next as a surprise, like listening to the radio (gasp!), instead of needing to know what to search for.
MTV pretty much stopped showing videos a decade before You Tube was launched.
It was the first channel of its kind, and it launched as cable TV was really starting to take off.
When I was a kid in the 1970s, most people who had cable had it just so they could get HBO. Basic cable was $8 a month, and HBO was $8 extra. I have seen that listing, and it was worth about $8 a month, and that’s in 2016 dollars.
Looks like the actual name of the program is “MTV First Hour” and that what may be its last airing is tomorrow at 2 AM, Pacific on MTV Classic. (Uverse channel 521) As suits the era that it’s from, MTV Classic is not an HD channel, so your box may hide it from you if you normally only watch HD.
We watched it and it was fun to see 1981 again. They kept the commercials, though they looked like they were spliced in from old video tapes, complete with the VHS noise artifacts.
I told the wife I should send a SASE to the NYC address they gave to get an MTV Dial Sticker. You know, to put on the knob so you can remember where the MTV channel is. I wonder what I’d get in return.
The V-Jays were so young!
There weren’t really that many videos; lots of them there were merely concert clips. But as I said earlier, it was fun to have it on and see who would show up next. Plus I remember back then saying “so that’s what that singer/band looks like”.
[QUOTE=JohnGalt]
We watched it and it was fun to see 1981 again. They kept the commercials, though they looked like they were spliced in from old video tapes, complete with the VHS noise artifacts.
I told the wife I should send a SASE to the NYC address they gave to get an MTV Dial Sticker. You know, to put on the knob so you can remember where the MTV channel is. I wonder what I’d get in return.
[/QUOTE]
All that hiss behind the Dolby spot was ironic.
And I’d completely forgotten about that kludge of having to tune the stereo to 97.3 or whatever to get the sound as TVs with stereo sound were either a rarity or not even on the market yet.
Oh, is that why I sometimes saw radios with a TV band when I was a kid? I could never understand why people would just listen to television shows!
No, that’s not what the TV band was for. The TV band on radio was simply to listen to TV broadcasts. It was usually only VHF band, so they weren’t useful where I lived. In Austin, only one channel broadcast VHF band. The other two networks were UHF.
What gotpasswords is talking about was plugging the cable into the antenna input on your stereo receiver. Cable companies would then assign different channels to different frequencies, just as on your TV. So, they would pick up local radio channels and lock them onto a frequency so that a person could get clear reception no matter where he lived. Some TV channels, notably MTV and HBO also got frequencies so that viewers could listen to the programs in stereo.
What they should do is COMPLETELY start over and rerun all of MTV in order 24/7 starting with day one. That would be a good 15 years or so. 