Discuss.

It is destroying the newspaper business as well.

I thought of writing a song parody with that title last year. But I agree... it's true that Internet Killed The Video star. At least as far as MTV goes.


But new singers are making YouTube videos... so they're not all dead yet... I'm think of making one with my band The ET Teenage Mimickers.

The Internet will kill all traditional forms of telecasting before long, but I agree that MTV was one of the first concepts to be supplanted. Mind you, it's been so long since MTV really lived up to its name (Music Television) it's no great loss. Even compared to MTV's prime, being able to punch up virtually any video you feel like seeing at any moment on YouTube, from any artist who has any measure of popularity anywhere in the world, is a much better experience than Martha Quinn et al ever served up. YouTube just needs to offer higher quality resolution, that's all. I saw that they're already testing different levels of resolution on the newer uploads ... they'll be all-HD one day.

newspapers, periodicals, CD's etc. will all be gone someday due to the internet.

ever wonder what the world do if the internet suddenly crashed and everything on it was gone forever?

Jimbo would have to console himself with owning every CD in existence.

The witty repartee of this board, however, would be considerably slowed down as we sent actual messages to each other. Send out a great zinger and wait a couple of weeks for the reply.

"The Real World" and "Remote Control" killed the video star.

Those two shows opened the floodgates for non-music programming on MTV, long before the Internet posed any threat to it. It was around, but there was no streaming media.

There's actually a few bands with videos that I know I've seen before that aren't on YouTube. You have to go pretty obscure, though.

Now that VH1 Classic is cluttered with movies and old countdown shows like "The 100 Best Love Songs," I'm waiting for the launch of Classic VH1 Classic.

Yeah, bad reality shows & hip hop killed MTV & VH1 long ago.

I can't remember the last time I turned on MTV or any of those channels.

If you want a video, you kinda have to turn to youtube.

B U L L S E Y E !!!

There is not yet a single "reality" show that I'm a fan of. I intentionally use the quotation marks around "reality" because I feel that it implies an undeserved reputation for integrity and spontaneity - when, in fact, few programs are more contrived and fake.

IMHO, the term "reality television" is the ultimate oxymoron.

100% agreed. What's happened to our world.........?

As a lifelong collector of MTV videos, I can tell you it wasn't the internet. I would agree that MTV's airing garbage like "Remote Control", "The Real World", "Road Rules", "Sporting Fool", "Pauly Shore" and whatever else crap they could think of did it. MTV actually still showed videos into the late 90s, then they said, "Well, let's just stop altogether except at 4am, and create another channel for people who actually watch videos and call it M2".
M2 was simply awesome-they showed videos even MTV had never played. One minute you'd see Tool, then A Flock Of Seagulls, followed by Van Halen, Supergrass, XTC, Echo & Bunnymen, Iron Maiden, Beck, Air and more. It was total freeform and 24 hours of videos. And then, that was destroyed by 2003 or so. Now MTV2 (as it was renamed) is endless crud like "Rob & Big", "Jackass", "Cribs", etc. It's so frustrating and sickening it's just sad.
VH1 Classic was also awesome but is now a travesty and they show "Saturday Night Fever" 24 hours a day and the same 5 hours of Rod Stewart and Elton John videos.
However, music videos are still hugely opular and can break bands big-You Tube saved the music video in fact.
Does anyone out there have any old MTV blocks with videos, commercials and VJs from the 80s? I have many hours of that stuff, but I'm always looking for more-it's truly a nostalgia trip. Especially the commercials!

Stuck in a hotel room, I watched "America's Best Dance Crew" on MTV. It was oddly compelling. One of the teams was from my sister-in-law's small Indiana town.

A few weeks back, a friend and I sat up all night drinking beer and watching music videos on YouTube. New stuff, old stuff, old favorites, new bands. It was like the days when MTV showed music, only we got to choose what we watched and when we watched it. And there was beer.

I fell hard for MTV when it was new, but it wasn't long before it got kind of old for me. I didn't like the way that video images popped into my head every time I heard a hit song I like. I like it when music is the soundtrack to MY life, not some video director's dream.

I don't know if it killed video, but the internet is changing everything. In some ways that's good, in some ways it's bad. The thing is, it's never easy to see things change when you like them just the way they are. They always do, though.

My parents never got cable until 1989, when I was 21. As a result, I consider myself blessed--MTV's "golden age" coincided with one of the worst decades of music ever IMO. The 80's are far and away the decade least represented in my music collection, filled out mostly by compulsive completist needs (for example, my discs from 1983 include Dylan's "Infidels", Townshend's "Scoop", the soundtracks for "Octopussy" and "Return Of The Jedi", Richard Pryor's "Here And Now" and that's about it.)

As the same time, however, I just don't have the patience to sit on the couch and either watch music being performed, or to watch artsy-fartsy music videos as a song plays in the background. The music DVD's that I do own, I tend to listen to, rather than watch.

The internet, of course, is a great place to watch vintage video that hasn't seen any official release...but like all bootlegs, much of the pleasure in watching them is knowing that this is material that, for one reason or another, isn't meant to be watched.

What about bootlegs of promo films that, although never meant for commercial release or sale, were meant to be watched?

Well, maybe that was a bad choice of phrase...I just think that most of the pleasures of bootlegs tend to be their illicitness. While some bootlegs stand up quite well next to "official" material, they tend to lose some of their aura upon official release.

Probably the same reason why even crummy demos of crummy songs from a favorite band are pure GOLD when they're unreleased, but once they end up tacked onto the end of a re-release or as filler for a box set they become far less alluring.

I could never figure out how MTV had the gall to run commercials when their content was all commercials!