45 years ago today, August 1, 1981, MTV made its debut at 12:01 a.m. Eastern, launching with the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” as its first video.
The channel originally aired music videos around the clock, guided by television personalities known as video jockeys, or VJs, with Nina Blackwood, Mark Goodman, Alan Hunter, Martha Quinn and J.J. Jackson (RIP 3-17-2004) as its founding lineup. MTV became a cult hit as it expanded into other countries and was a major factor in cable programming’s rise throughout the 1980s and ’90s, reshaping how American networks reached younger audiences.
In the decades since, MTV has significantly scaled back its focus on music videos in favor of original reality programming aimed at teenagers and young adults, a shift that began in earnest with The Real World in the early 1990s and continues to define the network today.
