Did MTV shut down on New Year's Eve 2025?
No. On January 1, 2026 social media filled with posts saying MTV had gone off the air after 44 years, and Variety published a correction the same week. The flagship MTV channel kept broadcasting in the United States and the United Kingdom.
What actually closed were the music-only channels. Five of them went dark in the UK on December 31, 2025: MTV Music, MTV 80s, MTV 90s, Club MTV and MTV Live. Paramount shut music-only channels in Australia, Poland, France and Brazil as well.
A Paramount spokesperson told Variety in 2025 that "MTV's specialist music channels in the UK will no longer operate as linear channels," and said the company was adjusting its international pay TV portfolio as audiences moved to streaming and digital platforms. MTV and MTV2 in the United States were not part of that cut.
So the answer is narrower than the headlines. MTV exists, and it is owned by Paramount Skydance Corporation, which took over when Skydance Media and Paramount Global completed their merger on August 7, 2025. The version of MTV that ran videos back to back all day stopped existing in most of the world at the end of 2025.
What did MTV broadcast on its first day in 1981?
MTV launched at 12:01 a.m. on August 1, 1981 with the line "Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll," then footage of a space shuttle launch, then the first video: "Video Killed the Radio Star" by the Buggles. The song was not even new. It had been released as a single in 1979.
The channel reached only a handful of cable systems at first, most of them in New Jersey, and record labels had to be talked into handing over videos for nothing.
That argument ended on December 2, 1983, when MTV premiered Michael Jackson's "Thriller." It ran 14 minutes, was directed by John Landis, and cost roughly $500,000, part of it covered by MTV and Showtime in exchange for the rights to air it. A cable channel had become the place a record was launched rather than a place it was repeated. The first MTV Video Music Awards followed in 1984.
Why did The Real World change MTV's economics in 1992?
The Real World premiered on May 21, 1992. Mary-Ellis Bunim and Jonathan Murray put seven strangers in a New York loft, pointed cameras at them and dropped the script, borrowing the idea from An American Family, the PBS documentary series from 1973.
It became the longest-running program in MTV history, and it solved a problem videos never could. A music video was free to air, but it belonged to a record label. MTV could play it, promote it and build a countdown around it, and own none of it.
An unscripted series was different. MTV commissioned it, kept it, repeated it, sold it abroad and shot another season for a fraction of what scripted television cost. Every reality order that followed, from Road Rules in 1995 to Jersey Shore in 2009, ran on the same logic. Videos filled airtime. Shows built a library.
When did music videos actually disappear from MTV?
There is no single date, which is why people keep asking. MTV president Van Toffler told Billboard in 2001 that "clearly the novelty of just showing music videos has worn off," and the schedule moved with him.
Videos still filled up to eight hours a day in 2000. By 2008 the average was about three hours a day, much of it before breakfast, and through the 2010s even that thinned out.
The last daily countdown ended in the middle of that slide. Total Request Live launched on September 14, 1998, with Carson Daly counting down the ten most requested videos from a studio window above Times Square. MTV announced the cancellation in September 2008 and aired a three-hour finale, Total Finale Live, on November 16, 2008. It is still the longest-running live series MTV has produced.
Two outside forces finished the job. Napster gutted the label revenue that paid for videos, and YouTube, launched in 2005, meant nobody had to sit through an hour of programming to see one.
What fills MTV's schedule in 2026?
Clip shows and reruns, mostly. Variety reported in November 2025 that MTV had canceled Ridiculousness after 46 seasons, with already-filmed episodes still scheduled into 2026. Reruns of that one show had carried most of the channel's week for years.
The one music night left is the Video Music Awards, and even that moved house. The 2025 VMAs aired on CBS for the first time on September 7, 2025, simulcast on MTV and streaming on Paramount+. More than 5.5 million people watched, up 42 percent from 3.91 million the year before, and the largest television audience the show had drawn since 2019.
That number is worth reading twice. The biggest music event on a channel named Music Television now needs a broadcast network to find its crowd.
Where did the MTV News archive go?
MTV News closed in May 2023, when Paramount cut 25 percent of US staff across Paramount Media Networks, Showtime and MTV Entertainment Studios. Paramount Media Networks president Chris McCarthy pointed to "broader economic headwinds like many of our peers."
The reporting outlived the newsroom by about a year. In June 2024 mtv.com/news went offline and the archive went with it, with visitors redirected to the MTV home page. Paramount said in a statement that "as part of broader website changes across Paramount, we have introduced more streamlined versions of our sites, driving fans to Paramount+ to watch their favorite shows."
The Internet Archive rebuilt what it could, publishing a searchable index of 460,575 pages from mtv.com/news going back to 1996. It is the same reason the handful of 90s websites still online matter more every year, and the same reason people who taped MTV off cable now pay to digitize those VHS tapes. The official copy is not always the one that survives.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is MTV still on the air in 2026?
Yes. The flagship MTV channel still broadcasts in the United States and the United Kingdom in 2026, and MTV2 still runs in the US. What closed on December 31, 2025 were five UK music-only channels, MTV Music, MTV 80s, MTV 90s, Club MTV and MTV Live, along with music-only channels in Australia, Poland, France and Brazil.
Who owns MTV now?
MTV is owned by Paramount Skydance Corporation, which was created when Skydance Media and Paramount Global completed their merger on August 7, 2025. MTV sits in the same portfolio as CBS, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central and BET, and the company trades on Nasdaq under the ticker PSKY.
When did MTV stop playing music videos?
MTV never announced a stopping date, it tapered off. Videos filled up to eight hours a day in 2000 and about three hours a day by 2008, and Total Request Live, the last daily video countdown, ended with a finale on November 16, 2008. By the 2010s MTV's schedule was built on reality and clip shows instead.