VIVA is a German, private music television channel located in Cologne, Germany. It was founded in 1993 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.
On the 21st March 1995, the channel VIVA ZWEI ("VIVA Two") was created and on the 1st January 2002, it was renamed by VIVA PLUS.
Today, the company is divided into the "Viva und 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 the main competitor to VIVA, MTV, creating a virtual monopoly in German music television.
Since 1995, VIVA has a pop music award ceremony with the annual Comet prizes.
In 2003, VIVA had broken the unwritten rule that television should be have a neutral viewpoint after 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.
Following the acquisition of VIVA by Viacom, VIVA will close its operations based in Cologne with an expected job-losses totalling 290 employees and will start broadcasting from Berlin, where MTV Germany is based.
See Also
TMF – VIVA's Dutch counterpart owned fully by MTV Networks
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