MTV (originally an initialism of Music Television) is an American basic cable and satellite television channel owned by the MTV Networks Music & Logo Group, a unit of the Viacom Media Networks division of Viacom. The channel is headquartered in New York City, New York. Launched on August 1, 1981,the original purpose of the channel was to play music videos guided by television personalities known as "video jockeys," or VJs. In its early years, MTV's main target demographic were young adults, but today, MTV's programming is primarily targeted at adolescents and teenagers in addition to young adults.
MTV has spawned numerous sister channels in the U.S. and affiliated channels internationally, some of which have gone independent. MTV's influence on its audience, including issues related to censorship and social activism, has been a subject of debate for years.
Several concepts for music video television programming had been around since the early 1960s.
The Beatles had used music videos to promote their records starting in the mid-1960s. The creative use of music videos within their 1964 debut film A Hard Day's Night, particularly the performance of "Can't Buy Me Love", led MTV decades later to honour the film's director, Richard Lester, with an award for "basically inventing" the music video.
In his book The Mason Williams FCC Rapport, author Mason Williams states that he pitched an idea to CBS for a television program that featured "video-radio," where disc jockeys would play avant-garde art pieces set to music on the air. CBS cancelled the idea, but Williams premiered his own musical composition, "Classical Gas", on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, where he was head writer.
In 1970, Philadelphia-based disk jockey Bob Whitney created The Now Explosion, a television series filmed in Atlanta and broadcast in syndication to other local television stations throughout the United States. The series, which featured promotional clips from various popular artists, was canceled by its distributor in 1971.
Several music programs originating outside of the United States, including Australia's Countdown and the United Kingdom's Top of the Pops, which had initially aired music videos in lieu of performances from artists who were not available to perform live, began to feature them regularly by the mid-1970s.
In 1974, Gary Van Haas, Vice President of Televak Corporation introduced a concept to distribute a music video channel to record stores across the United States, and promoted the channel, Music Video TV, to distributors and retailers in a May 1974 issue of Billboard. The channel, which featured video disc jockeys, signed a deal with US Cable in 1978 to expand its audience from retail to cable television. The service was no longer active by the time MTV launched in 1981.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTV
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