An MTV Station Showing Music Videos

There was a free preview of several television stations last week including HDNET Movies, Sony Movies, and the Smithsonian Channel. There really wasn't anything on any of these channels worth watching or recording, but I decided to check out the station MTV Live. This station had a novel concept. It showed music videos.

For those of you under 25 (who am I kidding? No one under 25 is reading this!), MTV, short for Music Television, launched in 1981 and played music videos. The station added other shows over the years and pretty much abandoned showing videos. VH1, or Video Hits 1, emerged a few years after MTV and still played videos after MTV stopped, but they also chose other programming over videos. (RIP VH1's Top 20 Video Countdown). So I was excited to see a station showing music videos again.

Over about 30 minutes or so, I saw videos by Taylor Swift, several K-Pop bands, and other bands/artists I've never heard of. There was a new video by Limp Bizkit that wasn't terrible. Please don't consider that last sentence an endorsement. There was also this cool looking video by Julian Lennon, WHO is ROLLING like STONES as the son of a famous British musician. (See what I did there?)

I checked out the station the next night and saw some of the same videos again. And commercials. I quickly realized that MTV made the right decision not airing music videos anymore. While I still think there is value to a video countdown show, few people are going to sit and watch random videos with commercials breaks as long as YouTube is around. Or just about anything else airing or streaming.