Hi,
I thought the M has been missing for almost 25 years!
It was a great idea, but sadly, the reality was that it became a nudity thing with models and such, and nowadays it is not cool to do that ... and no one wants to do videos about rats and dumpsters! Besides the fact that it will never get shown!
All in all, I think that a lot of videos, and this goes back to the first ones, were not very good, and in essence they were not really about the music itself, but some ego-side of a lot of the music and bands involved, and in the end, those attitudes will fall off the end of the earth like anything else.
I, originally, thought that it would have been a great place for live shows, but the music industry got paranoid, instead of taking an idea from the Grateful Dead and Tangerine Dream and others, and it was to also package the show and sell it ... and that kinda takes away the bootleg and the rip's for the Tube and such, for the most part.
In the end, MTV fell in the hands of the typical idiot that runs the American Cable Networks and channels and as such it was doomed to fall apart without interest ... and I sincerely doubt that the "costs" for many of these videos was the issue that helped kill it ... the majority of the videos that MTV showed were utter crap and badly defined and designed videos done on shoestrings and making sure the almost naked model took your attention so you would not see the cheap backgrounds. It doesn't take talent or a lot of money to do that kind of stuff, specially today, when video is it, and film is no longer in anyone's thoughts. At least, in 1975, film was still the way to go, and that cost was not exactly ... open to everyone.
In the end, there has to come up a new venture that is not afraid to show new folks and new works, and tell those old networks to die ... they are all crinkly and with arthritis anyway!