This year, the MTV Video Music Awards will air on … CBS?
The September 7, 2025 MTV VMAs will still air on MTV as per usual, but an expansion of the awards show’s regular live simulcast finally brings Paramount Global’s broadcast network CBS and its streaming service Paramount+ into the mix. (The 2024 VMAs were made available next-day on Paramount+.)
Considering the fact that the VMAs were just about the last thing MTV had going for it, this is a notable moment in what has been the slow, prolonged death of the once-mighty cable favorite. Long gone are the music videos, and original programming followed suit years ago. In 2023, after 36 years, MTV News signed off for good. The same year, amid the writers strike, the channel’s other awards show, the MTV Movie & TV Awards, was forced into a pre-taped shell of its former self. It hasn’t recovered.
The MTV Movie & TV Awards were just straight-up canceled in 2024 — and concrete plans for a return have not been shared — the same year Paramount Global and David Ellison’s Skydance announced a definitive agreement to combine companies. Major layoffs, the shuttering of Paramount TV Studios and an initiative to cut $500 million in costs followed. The 2025 MTV Europe Music Awards (EMAs) and the CMT Music Awards will be skipped in an effort to “reimagine and optimize” the events slate, according to an internal Paramount memo, obtained by The Hollywood Reporter. Well, this is one way to do that.
By now, the astute MTV-is-just-Ridiculousness-reruns joke feels almost as old as your average CBS viewer, and the inclusion of CBS and Paramount+ in the VMAs simulcast feels like it may be the final blow for the once-iconic cable channel. That doesn’t make it a bad idea — if anything, it was inevitable. In 2024, MTV ranked 55th in viewers (169,000 on average) across the 153 TV channels measured by Nielsen; CBS was second (3.9 million). Your average CBS fan may not be your average VMAs fan, but there is at least an opportunity for viewers. (MTV says the 2024 VMAs “delivered its biggest multi-network audience in four years.”)
And heck, even the Oscars live-streamed on Hulu this year, padding its ABC viewership with cord-cutters (and antenna-nevers, we suppose). Hope you’re sitting down for this one, Gen X: CBS may be the only way to save the VMAs.
Under Ellison, almost all of Paramount’s remaining TV properties have an unknown future, particularly the platforms (and you can double that for the linear cable channels). CBS is the likely exception, Paramount+ has a puncher’s chance, and Pluto TV may be flipped for cash. The days were already numbered for MTV the cable channel, and today’s pivot almost certainly subtracts a bunch more of those. If it can save MTV the brand, all the better. Otherwise the VMAs may go the way of the radio star music video.
Reps for MTV did not immediately respond to THR‘s request for comment on this story.
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