Viva

VIVA is a German, private music television channel located in Cologne, Germany. It was founded in 1993 by a shareholder group led by Time Warner and headed up initially by Dieter Gorny to compete with MTV, the market leader at the time. Being the first music channel to broadcast in German, VIVA was able to secure a close lead in the ratings for the target audience.

Related Topics:
German - Television channel - Cologne - 1993 - Time Warner - Dieter Gorny - MTV

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On 21 March 1995 a second channel, VIVA Zwei ("VIVA Two"), was created and on 1 January 2002 it was renamed VIVA Plus.

Related Topics:
21 March - 1995 - 1 January - 2002

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Since 1995, VIVA has a pop music award ceremony with the annual Comet.

Related Topics:
1995 - Comet

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In 2003, VIVA had broken the unwritten law that television should have a neutral viewpoint when it openly expressed an anti-Iraq War view. Later that year, VIVA got bad press after it was discovered that VIVA had given Universal Music an unfair advantage in the placement of their music videos.

Related Topics:
2003 - Neutral - Viewpoint - Iraq War - Universal Music - Music video

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Today, the company is divided into the "VIVA Fernsehen GmbH", "VIVA Plus Fernsehen GmbH", "Brainpool TV GmbH", and "VIVA Media Enterprises". Since 2004, the main shareholder is the media company Viacom (98%), who also owns MTV, the main competitor to VIVA, creating a virtual monopoly in German music television. Following the acquisition of VIVA by Viacom, VIVA will close its operations based in Cologne with expected job-losses totaling 290 employees and will start broadcasting from Berlin, where MTV Germany is based.

Related Topics:
2004 - Shareholder - Viacom - Competitor - Monopoly - Berlin

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The concept behind VIVA originated in 1992 when the major record labels were frustrated by MTV Germany's decision to program in English to the Germanophone markets and their consequent refusal to play major German-speaking artists. Tom McGrath, then President of Time Warner International Broadcasting, assembled a group of record labels that included Warner Music, EMI Music, Sony Television along with Frank Otto, APAX partners and DoRo Productions from Austria (Rudy Dolezal and Hannes Rossacher). With Dieter Gorny brought on board to lead the channel the group applied for cable carriage licenses in the various German Bundeslander, a process that took almost one year. DoRo designed the original programming format which while clearly a music video channel, sought to differentiate itself from MTV not just by having a German speaking voice, but by speaking directly to the differences in pop culture between Germany and the anglophone MTV. Ironically, before launching the channel, the labels offered to fund MTV in a German speaking version, but were rejected by MTV management at the time who espoused a "one world, one language" programming philosophy (at least for Europe since their South American Channels used Spanish and Portuguese).

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