So what to make of the Mediaworks refit of C4 as The Edge TV? According to The Buggles, video was meant to kill the radio star, but sadly it hasn't even given them a sniffle.
Like cockroaches, radio stars have lived on through the atomic blast ofmusic TV and have even survived the neutron bomb of the Internet era.
While radio listenership and revenues are down slightly on a decade ago, it's still a pretty strong business proposition, most of us still listen and the commercial stations are worth hundreds of millions of NZ dollars every year. New technology may have given the bash to newsprint but the radio star lives on.
The concept of The Edge TV is simple and makes all kinds of commercial sense. No doubt there was a board meeting where synergies and cross-promotional digital convergence opened the kimono to take a good long look at the core values.
The effects of all this wall to wall cross promotional, cross platform, hoo-ha, have yet to be fully realised, though the results of a brief test I conducted - using a pet rat exposed to Jono and Ben on TV, radio, Facebook, twitter, and as a pen pal - are chilling.
It's not exactly scientific, but I believe the fact that my pet, Percy, checked himself into a vivisection lab to "escape" is telling.
The effects on humans are more subtle, after all Percy faints after a drop of Coca Cola, where I can down a 1.5 litre without obvious harm. (I'm writing this from hospital).
The real worry is that soon these people will be in our lives 24/7. They will be on the radio. They will be on TV. There they are writing columns for the paper, and, eventually as automated droids fluffing our milky latte's in a Wild Bean Café.
Video isn't killing the radio star, it's turning them into brands that we can never escape.
On the upside, music TV is full of some brilliant music videos. Yes there's appalling dribble, like poor old Pink singing about someone who dumped her, but there's good stuff as well, and I know, I'm hardly the target demographic.
Listening to the music from another room brought to mind a corporate 3D printer, spewing out a constant flow of nursery rhymes performed by evil chipmunks. But I've always enjoyed watching music TV. It's the most disposable and instantly gratifying of all. Juice, J2, I'll even watch MTV, but The Edge TV is the only one that gets to the half of the country who watch via Freeview.
In my mission to sample the channel, I was initially taken by an inventive clip using thermal imaging from the artist 94 FT. Jesse Glynne, for the song My Love.
This was on at 2pm on a Saturday - and involved dropping E's and having it off. Still kids see worse stuff on their phones these days, right?
Given that, I wondered what perversions Perve - the Sunday night show that has been promoted as a smut fest - could possibly hold. As it turned out, it was the usual suspects: The decade old video of Satisfaction - you know the one with the wobbling lubed up ladies with the jackhammers.
There was also the rather brilliant erection based comedy of Turn Down For What? from DJ Snake and Lil Jon, and even one with former nice boy Bruno Mars sleazing it up in a strip club.
My teenage Sunday nights were spent with Dr Rock and Karyn Hay, now all these years later it's Radio With Bitches.
My 20's coincided with Max TV, the Auckland based music channel that had an alt attitude and housed some true looseness and inspired lunacy, most of it found on a Sunday night show called Box Dog.
It's the stuff of legend, and is seen by people over 30 through a haze of bottle-top thick rose tinted glasses. But then Max was more 95bFM, and The Edge TV is just that, it's The Edge. Ironically, that means it's less edgy.
In some ways it's business as usual, C4 rebranded with a touch of organized weirdness, or corporate anarchy.
But some of that Max spirit lives on. There's Guy Williams being pummeled by a heavyweight boxer, in a segment called "What is it like to be hit by a heavyweight boxer?"
The long suffering radio sidekick Chang is also on hand to be used and abused, a skill he has made into a career. In one scenario he is the victim of Guy Williams, in sadistic mode, with a paintball gun, firing madly as Chang tries to answer impossible questions. "I got a shot on my kidney!" he yells, clearly not faking the pain.
That spirit is also there in a nice piss-take of the Radio Live TV commercials, featuring a more realistic office dynamic and Dom Harvey as a douche.
I only stumbled across one local clip - if Kimbra still counts as local. It's an impressive video for a song called 90s Music a clever phantasm of day-glow colours and green-screen wizardry celebrating the icons of the 1990s. The 1990s as nostalgia? It feels like 5 years ago to me.
