I remember what a breakthrough MTV seemed when the U.S. network first signed on the air in 1981, with the phrase "Ladies and Gentlemen - Rock and Roll!" followed by its first ever song, "Video Killed The Radio Star," by The Buggles. (Canada's MuchMusic would not sign on until August 31, 1984.)

Not a lot of people were watching those early efforts and it took a while for "Music Television" to catch on. But the truth is it had already been tried before on a local Atlanta TV station way back in 1970. WATL-TV did not have a lot of programming to show back then, so they decided to create the equivalent of a music video show - even in the days when there weren't any real music videos. 

The show was called "The Now Explosion" and featured what few promotional rock videos there were and it improvised the rest. It was way ahead of its time and has almost been lost to history. But the article below brings it back to life and it's truly amazing how far ahead of the curve they were. 

"Young performers were recruited to dance, mime and generally fool around in front of the cameras while whatever happened to be climbing the charts played underneath them. Other sequences were shot on location, creating strange little visual interpretations of popular songs...Sometimes they amounted to little more than attractive young people dancing around while the production crew threw every visual trick they could find at the screen, but that’s precisely what makes the surviving footage so much fun.

And God bless them, they threw everything at it: rapid zooms, multiple exposures, psychedelic colours, solarisation, shapes floating across the screen, faces dissolving into other faces, people dancing in parks and enough primitive electronic effects to make the whole thing look as though somebody had accidentally invented MTV while making an industrial quantity of acid-damaged public-access television."

Here's the story of this little known music TV pioneer.

‘The Now Explosion’: The TV channel that invented MTV 11 years before MTV

Fortunately, there are still a few remnants that have been saved for the archives and have turned up on YouTube.