MTV

MTV (originally an initialism of Music Television) is an American cable channel officially launched on August 1, 1981. Based in New York City, it serves as the flagship property of the MTV Entertainment Group, part of Paramount Media Networks, a division of Paramount Global.

The channel originally aired music videos and related programming as guided by television personalities known as video jockeys, or VJs.^[2] MTV was one of the American cable channels which was available in other countries that became a cult hit across the world and was one of the factors in cable programming’s rise to fame and American corporations overwhelmingly dominating the television economy in the 1990s.^[3][4] In the years since its inception, it significantly toned down its focus on music in favor of original reality programming for teenagers and young adults.

Since the late 2010s, MTV has devoted its programming schedule to select programs, primarily Ridiculousness, which in June 2020 aired “for 113 hours out of the network’s entire 168-hour lineup”.^[5][6]

MTV has spawned numerous sister channels in the United States and affiliated channels internationally, some of which have since gone independent. Approximately 90.6 million households in the US received MTV as of January 2017.^[7]