Hit Video USA was a 24-hour music video television network based out of

Houston Houston ( ) is the List of cities in Texas by population, most populous city in the U.S. state of Texas and in the Southern United States. Located in Southeast Texas near Galveston Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, it is the county seat, seat of ...

Texas Texas ( , ; or ) is the most populous U.S. state, state in the South Central United States, South Central region of the United States. It borders Louisiana to the east, Arkansas to the northeast, Oklahoma to the north, New Mexico to the we ...

. The station debuted in 1985 as a low power

television station A television station is a set of equipment managed by a business, organisation or other entity such as an amateur television (ATV) operator, that transmits video content and audio content via radio waves directly from a transmitter on the earth's s ...

in Houston, operating on channel 5 there as 'TV5'. From 1985 to 1993, the station was located on the 35th floor of the Allied Bank Plaza/First Interstate Plaza (now Wells Fargo Plaza), a skyscraper in

Downtown Houston Downtown is the largest central business district in the city of Houston and the largest in the state of Texas, located near the geographic center of the metropolitan area at the confluence of Interstate 10 in Texas, Interstate 10, Interstate 45 ...

History

On September 17, 1987, a station spokesperson explained that the channel would sign off within 30 days unless it received $5 to $6 million in new equity.HIT VIDEO CITES NEED FOR MORE FUNDING TO STAY ON AIR
" ''

The Dallas Morning News ''The Dallas Morning News'' is a daily newspaper serving the Dallas–Fort Worth area of Texas, with an average print circulation in 2022 of 65,369. It was founded on October 1, 1885, by Alfred Horatio Belo as a satellite publication of the ' ...

''. September 18, 1987. Retrieved on April 8, 2010. "Hit Video, begun July 1985 as a music service on a Houston low-power television, started" and "A 24-hour music video service based in Houston, Hit Video USA, will go off the air in 30 days unless $5 million to $6 million in new equity can be raised, a spokesman for the company said Thursday." By 1990, it distributed music videos to 57 television stations in the United States. The venture removed obscenities from music. Across the country, several independent TV stations elected to carry the programming, along with numerous cable television systems. Original Veejays included Chris Kinkade, Suzanne Vafiadis, Greg Johnson, EJ Thacker, Karen Kay, Todd Stevens, Eric Easton, Betsy King and Dangerous Darren Burns.

Backlash

MTV MTV (an initialism of Music Television) is an American cable television television channel, channel and the flagship property of the MTV Entertainment Group sub-division of the Paramount Media Networks division of Paramount Global. Launched on ...

, alarmed by the competition, began making exclusive deals with record companies -- effectively blocking Hit Video USA from broadcasting some of the most popular videos ever made.

Shutdown

Hit Video USA owner Constance Wodlinger sued in federal court, claiming numerous violations of the nation's antitrust statutes. The litigation, protracted for many years by the lawyers, was finally settled out of court.

Viacom Viacom, an abbreviation of Video and Audio Communications, may refer to: * Viacom (1952–2005), a former American media conglomerate * Viacom (2005–2019), a former company spun off from the original Viacom * Viacom18, a joint venture between Pa ...

, owner of MTV, bought out Wodlinger and closed the network down.

References

{{American broadcast television Television stations in Houston