MTV was a 24-hour general entertainment channel specialising in music and youth culture programming which serves Australia and New Zealand.

[4] The "MTV" brand was launched in Australia during April 1987 as a music program that aired late on Friday and Saturday nights for its full six-year run on the free-to-air Nine Network.

[5] The program was hosted by Richard Wilkins and Joy Smithers with music news from Alison Drower.

MTV Australia's focus was predominantly on Australian, British, Canadian and American artists and the program rarely played other forms of rock and pop music.

The program presented a mixture of music videos, interviews and segments, and depended heavily on imported US content.

[9] Five months after the initial announcement of ARC's re-branding, MTV Australia was officially re-launched on Optus Television on 20 March 1997.

At the beginning of 2007 MTV re-located its head office from Ryde to Yurong St in East Sydney.

MTV Hits will play music 24 hours a day and MTVN Live will have concerts and festivals from around the world as well as documentaries.

[27] On 17 September 2019, it was reported that sister channel Network 10 would launch a free-to-air MTV Australia in the coming months.

A further announcement was made in May 2020 regarding a fourth multichannel from Network 10, which is expected to feature content from the back catalogue of ViacomCBS properties such as MTV and Nickelodeon.

At the same time, a suite of MTV-branded Pluto TV FAST channels were made available on Paramount-owned BVOD service 10Play.

This includes entertainment programs popular in the US such as Pimp My Ride, Life of Ryan, Laguna Beach/The Hills, and Room Raiders.

This exclusivity deal was dropped in late 2002 and in 2003 MTV became available in a premium package on the Foxtel subscription TV platform.

[43] In 2007 the competition ran again with the winners announced on 28 January 2008 at the ONE80PROJECT festival screening at Harmony Park in Surry Hills.

In 2007 rapper Snoop Dogg was to attend the MTV Australia Video Music Awards 2007 as a co-host on 29 April but a few days prior to the event it was announced that Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews would not grant him a Visa into the country because of past criminal convictions overseas.

[44] In response MTV Australia organised the "Vote for Snoop" campaign through MySpace which contained videos talking about how much he wants to become an Australian citizen in different situations.

[45] Occasionally Australian free to air television stations look at the success of shows on MTV before purchasing them for broadcast.

Public broadcaster ABC also purchased the rights to animation Daria, which formerly aired during its children's programming slot, edited for content.

In 2000 the website simply redirected to the American MTV site before the domain expired and was locked by a holding company.