Tedium - From Cable to Local 📺

Today in Tedium: The USA Network. The Home Shopping Network. MTV. Three networks that are synonymous with cable television. Three networks that have been active on cable and satellite tuners throughout the United States for at least 35 years. But despite this, each had a period where they were broadcast over the air in some way, shape, and form as over-the-air television channels. Despite the fact that these networks basically shaped modern cable, they each lived lives in a position to be tuned in, depending on your location, using a simple analog antenna. It sounds weird, I know, but it’s true. And in many ways, it reflects the strong pull of over-the-air television even today. Today’s Tedium talks cable channels’ broadcast misadventures. — Ernie @ Tedium

Do you think the second head on this two-headed dog represents the fact that MTV2 had interests in cable AND broadcast?

But wait, what about MTV? Why could people tune them in over the air? Credit The Box.

The joke about MTV in 2022 is that it exists to maximize Rob Dyrdek’s exposure to Middle America.

In recent years, the network has largely aired reruns of the Drydek-hosted clip show Ridiculousness, creating a monotonous flood of similar content on a channel that used to be the most diverse and interesting on the cable dial. (More recently, it’s tried to work in more episodes of Catfish: The TV Series, but it’s still mostly Ridiculousness.)

The root of this problem is essentially that, while MTV as a brand is still valuable, its linear television programming is the weakest part of that brand in 2022. This is highlighted by the fact that the most popular thing associated with MTV on cable television these days, the MTV Entertainment Studios-produced Yellowstone, airs on the Paramount Network.

But there was a time when MTV’s real estate was so valuable that it actually drew competitors. Competitors that its corporate parent had to squash. And that competition came in the form of a little network called The Box.

The Box, first founded in 1985 as the Video Jukebox Network, did something truly interesting: It figured out a way to make the music video model work. Essentially, it was a pay-per-view service, but rather than serving up scrambled movies, it offered music videos that could be purchased at any time by anyone viewing the network, as long as they were willing to pay 99 cents and dial a 900 number for the privilege. Essentially, as the name implies, it turned local television into a jukebox.

And this jukebox, depending on where you lived, could appear over the air, as well. While The Box had convinced a number of cable systems to pick up the service, which was essentially run in a way not unlike The Prevue Channel or The Weather Channel, there were some cities where the primary way people watched it was through their antenna, through local television affiliates.

The Box was one of those channels you heard rumors about being awesome from your out-of-town friends—in part because it played a lot of videos that MTV didn’t, including those by more local and regional acts (another benefit of setting up the service on broadcast).

It was an interesting model, and one that seemed to be gaining ground on MTV … that is, until 1999, when MTV’s owner Viacom swooped in to purchase The Box.

Around this time, MTV was having a sense of guilt about cutting back on music video coverage on its primary channel, MTV, along with sister network VH1. And as a result, the company had launched a second version of MTV called M2.

M2 was a great channel that seemed to be programmed by someone with taste, and that pulled in far more obscure videos that the primary channel did. (I remember seeing Weezer’s “The Good Life” on M2 at a time when MTV wasn’t playing Weezer because they apparently didn’t understand how awesome Pinkerton was.) However, M2 failed to reach a sizable number of subscribers in this format, potentially because The Box had sort of eaten its lunch, and in part because the growth of digital television had limited the number of channels many cable providers could offer.

But with its purchase by Viacom, The Box, which at its peak had reach in 30 million homes (compared to M2’s 12 million homes) had been neutered in the United States, though it maintains a foothold in the United Kingdom to the present day.

Observers were skeptical about what was about to happen. So was the Justice Department, which began investigating Viacom and MTV after the 1999 purchase.

“The Box had a lot of underground urban music,” media consultant Eric de Fontenay said in an interview with The Miami Herald in 2001. “It was known as one of the stations to find videos that you couldn’t find on others. All of this is under one house, Viacom. One company owns all the distribution channels for video music on cable—that’s disturbing.”

Big promises for a network that turned into the same wasteland as everything else.

Fuse, formerly MuchMusic USA, would ultimately gain enough national distribution to ease the antitrust concerns, but de Fontenay was right to be worried about The Box. With the added footprint, MTV rebranded the network as MTV2, slowly started adding traditional programming to the channel, and … started airing itself on the same low-powered terrestrial television networks that used to air The Box, meaning that for a period of about a decade, depending on what market you were in, you could watch MTV2 with nothing more than an antenna.

It wouldn’t last, presumably because Viacom probably wasn’t psyched about having to follow rules allowing public commentary and educational programming to appear on the channel, but it stuck around for quite a while.

In fact, Viacom actually replicated this exact strategy for the Spanish-language market a few years later, when it acquired the over-the-air music network MásMúsica TeVe in 2006, which it combined with its existing MTV Español and eventually rebranded as MTV Tres.

Like The Box, MásMúsica TeVe was an innovator in the space, helping to draw attention to the regional varieties of music and basically staying focused on music programming 24 hours a day. In a 2005 interview with Billboard, the network’s then-owner Eduardo Caballero noted that the network’s audience reach had expanded beyond Spanish-language viewers. “It’s such catchy music, and it is accepted by Spanish and English speakers,” he said.

In a lot of ways, you kind of have to find MTV’s tendency to purchase networks with comparatively more diverse and inventive programming options (even in some cases, technically innovative) and dumb them down for a more mainstream audience distasteful—especially in the case of these over-the-air networks, which Viacom bought as a part of some concentrated strategy, then left to die on the vine, letting the licenses run out.

If we all knew that this was eventually going to lead to MTV airing Ridiculousness 18 hours a day, I think we probably would have reconsidered our allegiance to MTV in the ’80s and ’90s.