Internet Killed the Video Star

VIVA’s gone now, technically speaking. Another dead channel. You might catch old clips sometime, the late versions, and think okay, MTV variant, got it. By that point it was. But there was a real VIVA, the one that started on December 1st, 1993, as a deliberate answer to MTV Europe. And it was genuinely strange.

MTV in those days was all grunge and American teenage angst and seriousness. VIVA looked at that and decided to go the other way. Color. Melody. A kind of visual chaos that looked almost psychedelic, or like someone behind the scenes was definitely tripping and okay with it. This was broadcast television.

The people who made it work were Stefan Raab, Heike Makatsch, Nils Bokelberg. They became famous because the network let them be genuinely unconventional without that familiar winking at the camera. They weren’t trying to brand themselves. They were just strange, and that was the whole point.

Viacom bought the network, which is always when things actually die. This year it closes for good, about 14 years after the sale. By then VIVA was already gutted anyway—safer, censored, more like everything else. The internet gets blamed for killing these kinds of things, and sure, maybe. But VIVA was already gone.

Still. There’s something worth mourning about it. Those old clips still feel like they belong to a different era, when strangeness on television didn’t have to justify itself or perform self-awareness. When you could just be genuinely unconventional and that was the entire point.

If you’ve got anything from back then—old recordings, memories, or the kind of souvenir the 90s were famous for—now’s when you’d want to pull it out. Feels right somehow.