Warner-Amex Satellite Productions's Music Television AKA WASP MTV AKA MTV

[disambiguation: W.A.S.P.]

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A joint venture betweens Warner Brothers Entertainment and American Express Credit Cards, Warner-Amex Satellite Productions, or WASP, was an early cable television content provider and, later, media conglomerate. Launching with the ill-defined Bravo channel in 1980, WASP hit paydirt with the debut of Music Television in 1981. WASP MTV, or colloquially, simply MTV, featured 'round-the-clock 24-hour music videos , a format heretofore unheard of on the nascent cable system. Looking to capitalize on the success of Time, Inc.'s risque direct-to-consumer offerings on HBO and Cinemax (AKA Skinemax), WASP MTV reputedly provided content "cheat sheets" to record labels advising on how to skirt the FCC's strict but porous decency restrictions . Bands responded with content steeped in sex, Satan, and narcotics. The vastly expanding syndicate of hair metal acts were consistently the most egregious in their exploitation of said loopholes, including Motley Crue, Def Leppard, Cinderella and, most notably, W.A.S.P., whose hit "Animal (F*ck Like a Beast)" was almost single-handedly responsible for the channel's temporary expulsion from basic cable packaging . WASP MTV was later purchased by Viacom, resulting in the official reduction of its name and call sign to MTV. However, its wayward spreading of questionable content peaked again in the early 1990's with the advent of gangster rap music, leading to a second, and much more costly jettisoning of the network from basic cable, at which time Viacom chose to focus, for reasons unknown, on decidedly anti-mainstream in-house content, including multiple seasons of the bizarrely dystopian animated series Aeon Flux.