Viva: The evening is over – the station is off at the end of the year – TV

Hamburg ..
The title was program. When Viva appeared on the program on December 1, 1993, she was the first "Too Cool for This World" video of the Fantastic Four. and exactly it was the video playback station at least in the 1990s also: virtually no other German TV channel had produced so much talent in a very short time like Viva,

Be it Stefan Raab, Heike Makatsch, Charlotte Roche, Matthias Opdenhövel, Oliver Pocher, Mola Adebisi, Tobias Schlegl, Sarah Kuttner or Enie van de Meiklokjes, they all started their careers at the music station.

Victim of the digital triumph

Viva's story also means that the TV channel was born at a very unfavorable time. A few days before the broadcast began on November 10, 1993, Mosaic was the first consumer web browser to enter the market. The triumph of the Internet has begun. One of his first victims was video clips without a digital strategy – just like Viva.

In principle, one could have taken the already 2005 channel from the transmitter. At that time, it was sold to the American company Viacom. Americans have been dragging it for a few more years. Saturday, Viva will be 25 years old. It's the last anniversary of the resort. A few days later, on December 31, it will be closed.

Stefan Raab scrapes the ukulele

All this was not predictable in the early 90s. On the contrary: MTV had managed to completely fill its program of music videos, in principle clips intended primarily to stimulate sales of music. The company did not want to leave the music industry to others. That's also why Universal Music, Warner Music and Sony Music founded Viva in 1993. By the way, the name officially means Videoverwertungsanstalt.

The program was anything but prosaic. Christoph Post, the first program director, had his unfamiliar presenters improvised: Stefan Raab rushed on the ukulele. Heike Makatsch gave the cute little girl. And Charlotte Roche has brought the public closer to the German-English nonchalance of all sorts of independent groups. Who arrived. Soon, Viva overtook MTV.

Viva went public in 2000 – but that did not end well

Finally, everything seemed possible. Viva had another channel with Viva Zwei. Offspring have also been created abroad. The successful production company Brainpool ("Beat the Star", "Ladykracher") was taken over. There were plans for the radio stations. In July 2000, Viva's CEO, Dieter Gorny, listed the issuer on the stock exchange. With the product, an Internet concept should be implemented.

But it was already too late for that. The new economy has collapsed and prices have fallen. The party was over. Viva was still trying to position her second station as "CNN of Music" – and failed miserably. MTV's mother, Viacom, swept the remains together.

The transaction came into force in January 2005. On February 15 of the same year, Youtube was founded. Since then, video clips have been targeted at younger target groups on the online portal. And even the old hero Viva Smudo of the Fantastic Four says today: "I did not know that Viva still existed."

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