MTV Did Not Shut Down Despite Social Media Posts

You’ve in all probability seen a variation of this news on social media over the past few days: MTV formally shut down on New Year’s Eve, ending their final broadcast the same approach the network began: With the clip “Video Killed the Radio Star” by The Buggles.

But those posts are misinformed. It’s New Year’s Day 2026, and MTV is still round. Granted, today the channel is playing a marathon of “The Big Bang Theory” sitcom repeats, so your interpretation of “MTV is still around” could fluctuate.

Here’s the place the confusion is coming from: On New Year’s Eve, Paramount Skydance did certainly shut down a number of MTV-branded music channels in the U.Ok. According to a source, “MTV’s specialist music channels in the UK will no longer operate as linear channels. The flagship MTV UK channel will continue to broadcast… Paramount is reviewing and adjusting its international Pay TV portfolio, given shifts in audience behavior towards streaming and digital platforms.”

As for the U.S., the current MTV channels will continue to broadcast without change — including MTV and MTV2. MTV hasn’t been “Music Television” for a very long time, however the network does still program some digital music channels in the U.S., including “MTV Classic” (playing retro music movies from the Eighties, Nineties and 2000s), “MTV Live” (which runs current music movies, in addition to other music programming from the Paramount library) and a set of MTV-branded FAST channels (“MTV Biggest Pop,” “MTV Spankin’ New,” “Yo! MTV” and “MTV Flow Latino”), which play modern music movies on Pluto TV.

Of course, followers of MTV’s golden Eighties, Nineties and 2000s period still look nostalgically at when the flagship network actually was about music. In those days, MTV’s programming consisted of music movies and music-oriented sequence like “Headbanger’s Ball,” “120 Minutes” and “Yo! MTV Raps.” Later, “TRL” was a day staple for a whole technology of children.

But in recent times, MTV has centered on actuality programming — which at the moment consists of “The Challenge” and “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” The network has also been criticized for its over-reliance on sequence like “Ridiculousness,” which often takes up the lion’s share of its programming. (As Variety wrote in 2020, at one point “Ridiculousness” took up 113 of 168 whole hours on MTV — 67.3% of its complete schedule.)

And that’s in all probability why, while inaccurate, this “news” that MTV is shutting down has resonated across social media — particularly among Gen Xers and Millennials. They still bear in mind that music on MTV got here more than just yearly on the VMAs. And they’ve also seen the latest studies of how cutbacks have eradicated the last vestiges of MTV as we all know it: In 2023, the remaining shell of a once-vibrant MTV News division was shut down, and then last 12 months the legacy MTV News web site went darkish, and its archives have been scrubbed from the web.

Then there was the sense in 2025 that we’ve hit the tipping point in the case of the decline in basic cable, as corporations like NBCU look to shed those once-valuable property. When Skydance acquired Paramount and began making drastic cuts, its cable networks have been hit particularly arduous: MTV shed most of its remaining comms and expertise groups, including top remaining music programming and expertise execs. The thought that even a major network like MTV would possibly shut down not appears so far-fetched.

According to Variety‘s 2025 tally of the most-watched linear networks in primetime, MTV rated No. 49 — with a mean of 189,000 viewers. In adults 18-49, MTV ranked No. 25. Compare that to 10 years in the past: In 2015, MTV ranked No. 36 with 606,000 viewers.

So sure, the MTV as we knew it disappeared a very long time in the past. But MTV as a channel still exists. For now.