After MTV closed down a lot of its 24-hour music-only channels – including five in the UK – on December 31, someone on Reddit has created an online alternative.
The website is called MTV Rewind, (But the URL is very clever: https://wantmymtv.xyz/ which recalls the Dire Straits song Money For Nothing, with Sting singing 'I Want My MTV') and it plays music videos all day without any modern ads (though you might see a few vintage commercials thrown in) or reality TV shows. It hosts over 27,000 music videos from the 1970s onwards, and visitors can filter by decade, step back in time with Yo! MTV Raps or Headbangers Ball, or simply shuffle the vast archive and leave it to fate.
On December 31 the network closed its final 24-hour music video stations across the UK, with MTV Music, MTV 80s, MTV 90s, Club MTV and MTV Live all being removed from platforms like Sky and Virgin Media. The flagship MTV channel will remain active in the UK, and it is expected to continue to primarily broadcast reality series.
As a sign-off, they played the video for 1979 new wave classic, a symbolic choice at it was also the first video that MTV ever aired when it launched in the US in 1981.
MTV’s parent company, Paramount Skydance, has also shuttered the same channels in Ireland, Germany, Austria, Poland, France, Hungry, Australia and Brazil (via Deadline).
After the launch of MTV in 1981, its counterpart channel MTV Europe followed in 1987 – opening with Dire Straits’ ‘Money For Nothing’ – and MTV UK arrived in 1997. That channel stopped showing music videos in 2011.
