That’s A&E, formerly Arts and Entertainment, I think.
I read something once that MTV had to regularly develop a new audience as its previous one aged out from watching it.
Ridiculousness Killed the Video Star.
When will they entirely abandon their MTV Music Awards and MTV Movie Awards?
I mean, do kids even watch those anymore? It was a big deal when I was about 13-16(1991-1994 time frame).
Music video television peaked with VH-1’s “Pop up video”, they should just show that 20 hours a day.
I remember Remote Control; it was funny. (And I think a very young Adam Sandler was on it.) They also had The Real World starting in 1992, which was before most reality shows.
I. Loved. Pop Up Video! I’d usually turn to MTV or VH-1 just to have some background music, but I’d sit down and watch Pop Up Video from beginning to end.
Yeah. MTV started with shows that revolved around showing music videos like Yo! MTV Raps, Headbanger’s Ball, Dial MTV, etc., etc. Then they started dabbling with original programming the likes of which you’d see on regular networks like Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes, Remote Control, Just Say Julie, and by the early 1990s they had a big hit with The Real World. By the mid 1990s, they were showing fewer and fewer blocks of music videos in favor of regular programming.
This made me realize that people have been complaining about the dearth of videos on MTV since I was a teen, 30 years ago.
Anyway, here’s a good podcast that came out last year, produced by someone who used to work at MTV, that goes into detail about what happened to the network. And it does mention many of the problems people have stated here - YouTube, advertiser issues with the short format, audience aging out.
Who Killed the Video Star: The Story of MTV - Podcast - Apple Podcasts
Bingo. What a lot of us are remembering is a relatively brief, shining moment in history. At this point, MTV hasn’t been MTV longer than it was MTV.
The undead channel in the history cable television; it has more vampires than True Blood.
Stranger
Pop Up Video was great and what was great about it was the factoids about the videos that we somewhat recently saw and remembered.
Liquid Television.
Gave us Beavis and Butthead, Daria and Aeon Flux. Loved that show.
Now that was cool!
That actually ran on MTV’s sister station, VH1, back when they showed videos, too.
I’d watch a channel that was just devoted to that. Holy crap it was the best.
“Beavis and Butthead” has new(er) episodes, on Comedy Central.
They also have “Old Beavis and Butthead”, probably the age they would be if the 1990s miscreants aged in real time. Butthead is fat and bald, and Beavis is skinny and wears glasses. They live together in a filthy studio apartment.