MTV3

A television channel in Finland.
The letter M does not stand for music, but the finnish word for advertisement, mainos. Surprisingly, the channel is funded by income from commercials.

MTV3 broadcasts sports, sub-par game shows, sports, pointless shows with nothing but easy listening music for the elderly, sports and hit series from the US. (...which are constantly replaced by sports. Got the idea?)

The station is notorious for two things:
1. Having tons* of stupid contests and competitions that involve calling expensive phone numbers or sending overpriced SMS:s to win cheap prizes. These competitions are advertised approximately 100 times every hour.
2. Using very poor, unimaginative and boring visual design in everything they do. Any 13-year-old kid with a pirated copy of Photoshop could do better.

*And I do mean TONS. When a certain program moved from Nelonen to MTV3 a while ago, it gained not one but two expensive SMS-games. And it didn't take long for Salatut Elämät to get its own regular SMS-contest plus a chat. These people make me sick.

You forgot that MTV3 also likes to
3. Start a new show with lots of hype, then move the show around to horrible time slots (and occasionally postpone the new episodes for a week so they can show more sports instead) and finally cancel the series since "it gets so poor ratings".

MTV3 Channel, the first Finnish commercial TV channel, started broadcasting on January 1, 1993. It is owned by MTV Finland, the third oldest commercial TV station in Europe (not to be confused with the MTV music channels). The number '3' in the name is propably derived from the fact that it was the third TV channel in Finland, preceded only by YLE TV 1 and TV 2 owned by Finland's national public service broadcaster. MTV3 Text Channel (a teletext sevice) started in March 3, 1994 and the company web site www.mtv3.fi in November 9, 1995. Both deliver information about the channel's content and also -being commercial media- tons of annoying advertisements.

According to the Finnpanel TV survey MTV3 had an audience share of 39,3% in Finland, measured in July - September 2000. The Top 5 Shows list of the last week of year 2000 shows pretty well the average content of the channel: licensed-format game shows, soap operas, news and an old movie every now and then.

1. Greed (a game show)
2. BumtsiBum (musical game show of the Lyrics Board format)
3. Salatut elämät (a Finnish soap)
4. Seitsemän Uutiset (newsflash)
5. Napakymppi (a blind date game show loved by elderly people)

Sources of information: MTV3 web site http://www.mtv3.fi, Finnpanel surveys at http://www.finnpanel.fi and YLE web site http://www.yle.fi.