IT WAS hardly a rebel yell, but the message was clear enough. Twenty-five years ago this week, MTV was launched to the strains of Video Killed the Radio Star by the Buggles.

Like alternative comedians challenging Tarbuck and co, or Botham’s generation seizing cricket from the broadsheets and handing it to the tabs, MTV was the upstart railing against middle age and middle-of-the-road. Half an hour of Top of the Pops wasn’t enough any more. The new generation wanted wall-to-wall music.

A quarter of a century later — and ironically as Top of the Pops has breathed its last — the tables have been turned. MTV, an established, huge, iconic brand, is fighting to avoid its own premature death at the hands of the new kids on the block, the impatient internet generation.

“The problem for MTV is that it is hard to be hip when you’re old,” Paul Zwillenberg, a media consultant with OC&C, said.

YouTube, the internet video site, is only 18 months old, but already it attracts six million viewers a day globally. Moreover, the average time spent online is 30 minutes. It is becoming cult viewing for the 12-to-34 audience.

Today, MTV is part of the media giant Viacom. There are 50 MTV channels around the world. Its sister network VH1 accounts for a further 17. An MTV channel is available in 171 territories and in 479.5 million homes.

Yet, despite its size, MTV has been forced to respond to the challenge posed by websites such as Bebo and YouTube. In the past year, it has launched a broadband channel, MTV Overdrive, an online music service, Urge, in the United States with Microsoft, and, last week, in Britain, unveiled Flux, a new hybrid aimed squarely at the YouTube generation — people who watch television and sit at the computer at the same time.

Flux is a website where people sign up and create their own digital virtual identity and where people can upload video content on to the site — and, if enough people vote for it, get that content aired on the channel, which will launch in September.

Although there is no evidence that young people’s time spent watching television is in decline, the consumption of two media at once is increasing — “60 per cent of people on computer at home have the TV or radio on” — according to Mr Zwillenberg.

Michiel Bakker, chief executive of MTV Networks in the UK, is hoping to create an environment where viewers “switch seamlessly from computer to TV content”, although MTV is careful to say that it will exercise modest editorial control. Furthermore, it takes some comfort from history. “The fact that we are still here today gives us confidence for the next 25 years,” Mr Bakker said. “We’ve reinvented ourselves continously — that’s why we’ve been able to succeed.”

Once the home of wall-to-wall music videos, MTV began to invest in its own programming to keep viewers tuned in. It can claim to have invented reality television, with The Real World, which followed a group of New York flatmates, and created series ranging from The Osbournes in America to the British stunts of Dirty Sanchez.

That helped MTV to remain as the No 1 music programmer in the UK. MTV’s share of all viewing is about 1 per cent in a typical week. Emap’s music channels have 0.9 per cent. More to the point, perhaps, MTV didn’t kill radio, and websites are unlikely to do the same to television, even over the next 25 years.

MILESTONES

1981, August 1: MTV launches with Video Killed the Radio Star, by the Buggles

1983: premieres Michael Jackson’s Thriller

1987: enters Europe, to Dire Straits’ Money for Nothing

1992: airs Real World, the first reality television show

1993: Bill Clinton kicks off his presidency with MTV’s Presidential Inaugural Ball

2000: Britney Spears sheds her squeaky-clean image at the MTV awards

2002: turns the Osbournes into TV stars

2006: launches Urge music store and creates Flux, allowing people to show home videos on television

Times Recommends

• Lies and cover-up at MG Rover exposed by report
• High oil prices push manufacturing costs up
• Primark founder steps down as chief executive