VERY INTERESTING NUMBER 53: MTV

 Hello ladies and gents this is the Viking telling you that today we are talking about

I WANT MY MTV!

In 1981 Robert Pittman, a 27-year-old vice president in charge of new programming at Warner-Amex, came up with an idea for Music Television, an all-music channel that would play almost nothing but rock videos. The gimmick: free programming—the videos would be supplied by record companies at no charge. “The explicit aim,” explains one critic, “was to deliver the notoriously difficult-to-reach 14 to 34 demographic segment to the record companies, beer manufacturers, and pimple cream makers.” Based on that appeal, Pittman talked Warner into investing $30 million in the idea. Four years later, Warner-Amex sold MTV to Viacom for $550 million. In 2015, Forbes estimated the brand’s worth was $6.5 billion. Today, it broadcasts in more than 50 different countries.

Pittman planned to call the channel TV-1, but immediately ran into a problem: “Our legal department found another business with that name. The best we could get was TV-M…and TV-M it was, until our head of music programming said, “Don’t you think MTV sounds a little better than TV-M?”

The design for the logo was another fluke. “Originally,” Pittman recalls, “we thought MTV would be three equal-size letters like ABC, NBC and CBS. But…three ‘kids’ in a loft downtown, Manhattan Design, came up with the idea for a big M, with TV spray painted over it. We just cut the paint drips off the TV, and that’s the logo. We paid about $1,000 for one of the decade’s best known logos.”

MTV originally planned to use astronaut Neil Armstrong’s words, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” with its now famous “Moon Man” station identification. “But a few days before we launched,” Pittman says, “an executive came flying into my office. We had just received a letter from Armstrong’s lawyer threatening to sue us if we used his client’s voice. We had no time and, worse, no money to redo this on-air ID. So we took his voice off and used the ID with just music. Not at all what we had envisioned, yet, fortunately, it worked fine.”

And as always have a chilled day from the Viking