MTV's Origins and Formatting
After The Bungles' music video for "Video Killed the Radio Star," this promo was the first thing to air on MTV when it launched on August 1, 1981. In it, VJ Mark Goodman describes how MTV will realize the promise of cable television by promising a new alternative, a unique marriage of television sight and sound. The promo shows how MTV utilized strategies of appropriation as fundamental to its branding and production strategies. Free public domain films are intercut with footage from music videos to introduce this new media experience, on cable, in stereo.
An early MTV video presentation, produced to convince advertisers to buy time on the new station, explained the channel was the latest offering from Warner American Express Satellite Entertainment Company, “pioneers in narrowcast programming services.” The Movie Channel had been the first 24-hour movie channel, and Nickelodeon the first day-long channel for young people. MTV would be the first to unite “the power of stereo music with all the visual impact of television.” Unsaid here, was that MTV was also the first of these narrowcast WASEC channels that would rely on advertising to make money. The Movie Channel was a premium subscriber service, and Nickelodeon in the early years was also ad-free, relying on carriage fees from cable operators who promoted the channel as a part of their basic packages that would be valuable to families. But MTV was conceived and launched as a commercial TV station, and thus needed to define for advertisers and advertising agencies what it was, just as MTV had to define itself for viewers, cable operators, and the music industry.
This promo is taken from MTV in December 1982, when the station was still working to explain to audiences what it was, and it echoes the descriptions that MTV execs gave to the press: “Suddenly there's something different about your TV. It's part of your stereo. MTV, music television is TV you use like radio. Turn it on anytime day or night and you know what you'll find: music."
In this excerpt from a 1983 interactive doc which aired on the Qube network, MTV executives discuss how computers facilitate the playlist, and how the flow of videos, commercials, and promos is executed at the satellite uplink facility.
