As we rang in 2026, a strange bit of news went viral on the internet – accounts across social media mourned the death of MTV. It was strange because MTV didn’t actually die, but it does reveal that people might care about it more than we realize.
In a world where media is rapidly changing, can we hold on to the MTV we once knew? At least one music archivist is working on it, but we’ll get to that in a bit. First, let’s dive into why people were saying goodbye to a cable channel that’s still around.
Dave Holmes – creator of the podcast “Who Killed The Video Star: The Story of MTV” – explained in a piece for Esquire that the confusion came from an announcement from MTV parent company Paramount. It announced in fall of last year that music only MTV channels introduced in the U.K. and Australia in the late aughts and early 2010s (including MTV Music, MTV ’80s, MTV ’90s, MTV Live, and Club MTV) would shut down on New Year’s Eve.
Those did shut down, but just in the U.K. and Australia. Regular MTV is still alive and well in those countries. It is in the U.S. too, along with supplemental music channels like MTV Classic and MTV Live.
“Providers like Tubi and Pluto still run even more 24/7 music FAST channels like MTV Spankin’ New, MTV Biggest Pop, and MTV Flow Latino,” Holmes added.
He explained that people seemed to grab headlines about the shutdown of the supplemental channels in the U.K. and Australia without reading the articles and then start posting about them on social media. That spawned misinformation that MTV was shutting down altogether, and to weird artificial-intelligence generated tributes posted days after it was clear that MTV was still on the air, as Holmes covered in his piece.
Now, let’s backtrack a bit. When MTV – short for Music Television – debuted in 1981 with the video for Video Killed the Radio Star by the Buggles, it did focus on music and music videos. Over the years, that format has evolved to include scripted shows and reality TV. Some notable MTV properties include Beavis and Butt-Head, The Real World, Jackass, Pimp My Ride and Jersey Shore. Then it started supplemental channels that focused on music, more like the first iteration of MTV.
Variety wrote in 2020 that the reality show Ridiculousness, focused on viral videos, took up 67.3% of MTV’s total schedule. In a piece for the outlet published on New Year’s Day, Michael Schneider said that the channel was playing a marathon of The Big Bang Theory, a sitcom that did not originate on MTV.
“Of course, fans of MTV’s golden 1980s, 1990s and 2000s era still look nostalgically at when the flagship network really was about music,” Schneider said.
Holmes also noted that people have been bemoaning changes at MTV, a channel that caters mostly to teens, since its early days.
“‘MTV sucks these days’ is as reliable a complaint as ‘Saturday Night Live sucks these days.’ That’s what happens to a thing that’s constantly evolving,” he said.
At the same time, he said sentiments about the passing of “Peak MTV” likely contributed to the unnecessary mourning for the channel over New Year’s. Recent years have also come with more ominous changes for MTV than more sitcom re-runs and reality programming.
“In 2023, the remaining shell of a once-vibrant MTV News division was shut down, and then last year the legacy MTV News website went dark, and its archives were scrubbed from the internet,” Schnieder reported. He also said “there was the sense in 2025 that we’ve hit the tipping point when it comes to the decline in basic cable, as companies like NBCU look to shed those once-valuable assets,” and that “MTV shed most of its remaining comms and talent teams, including top remaining music programming and talent execs.”
This year, MTV was in 49th place on Variety’s ranking of most watched linear networks in primetime with 189,000 viewers. A decade ago, it was in 36th with 606,000 viewers.
In the wake of the MTV misinformation situation, Homes noted that it stands out as a “five-alarm information catastrophe,” in an era of newsroom shrink and a prevalence of “AI nonsense” online. He also had a more positive take: “As scary and cringe as it has been, maybe the fact that this many people took the time to openly mourn MTV means there’s a need for it.”
So, what will we do if MTV does ever die for real? We’ll there’s that archivist mentioned at the beginning of this article. Going by the name “FlexasaurusRex,”they are working to bring back MTV vibes, including classic videos and even commercials, in the digital sphere here at the MTV Rewind fan site.