MTV actually stands for Mainos-TV (literally "Advertisement-TV", i.e. "Commercial TV[1]), due to the channel carrying advertising for revenue.

Oy Mainos-TV-Reklam Ab, or MTV for short, was founded on 29 April 1957[2] with the idea of establishing a commercial television channel that would show advertisements between programmes.

[3][4] Yleisradio was initially reluctant but eventually agreed to get additional revenue, which was required to produce programmes to compete with TES-TV.

[4] According to the initial agreement, MTV only got around ten hours a week of airtime, all outside the prime time and was not allowed to produce its newscasts nor air party political broadcasts.

This gave them a significant competitive edge over TES-TV since renamed to Tesvisio, whose broadcasts could only be watched in some of the larger cities.

In the mid-1980s, Yleisradio, MTV, and Nokia began a joint venture to establish a pay television channel.

MTV also began broadcasting their programmes on the channel and started to increase their share in the project.

MTV Oy was admitted as a full active member of the European Broadcasting Union in 1993, the same year MTV3 was launched.

The pre-dawn hours are allocated to a reel showing clips from programs that are on MTV Katsomo, a streaming service.

Much of the output of MTV3 is a mixture of Finnish versions of popular program formats and of American and British imports.