A Short History of the Medium

In the U.S. at 12:01 PM August 1, 1981 MTV launched with the words "Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll," spoken by original COO John Lack. Those words were immediately followed by the original MTV guitar riff over a montage of the most famous moment in world television history, the Apollo 11 moon landing.
Other entrepreneurs credited with the network's inception include former Monkee Michael Nesmith who had pioneered a program called PopClips and producers Alan Goodman and Fred Seibert.
Appropriately, the first music video shown was Video Killed the Radio Star by The Buggles. At launch time, the actual subscriber count across the U.S. was 500,000, though official counts listed 3 million.
As early as 1984, MTV was criticized for excessive pornographic references and accused of denigrating the importance of music, replacing it with a purely visual aesthetic and putting less image-centric acts at a distinct disadvantage.
On the other side of the moral influence debate, it has also come under criticism for being too politically correct and sensitive, censoring too much of their programming. Many music videos were censored, moved to late-night rotation, or banned entirely from the channel.
The early format was modeled after top 40 radio. Today, MTV has practically discarded music videos in favor of broadcasting a variety of pop culture, youth culture, and reality television shows aimed at adolescents and young adults.

How Do We Do It?

One day during the summer of 2006, The Phantom Hillbilly struck upon an idea: DJs are not in short supply. He loved music and entertaining crowds, but needed to offer something above and beyond the traditional in order to secure a spot at his favorite local haunt. A perusal of his DVD and VHS collection revealed he'd been inadvertently collecting music video collections of his favorite artists and his basement studio sported video as well as audio mixing equipment. He bounced the idea of an all-video night including his short comedy films produced for Independent Tuesdays film showcases off of Beulahland proprietor Jimmy Langen, who agreed to give it a biweekly trial run on a night that sorely needed more business.
The Phantom Hillbilly invited his con-conspirator in filmmaking and then-housemate, VJ Norto, to help wrangle equipment and found that he too had been an avid music video collector. Together, the two devised a system to make smooth transitions between music videos by separating the visual and audio elements, but their repertoire was limited. Within one year, their library had grown considerably due to a proliferation of digital-format videos which filled the gaps and broadened the variety they could present.
The legal ramifications were fuzzy in intellectual property terms until research revealed that music videos are promotional films for the very music bars pay ASCAP and BMI licensing to play.