MTV: In the Private Room, Watching the Movie Was Never the Point

Thirty-second overview: In 1985, Taipei’s “Super-Sensibility MTV Audiovisual Center” used a few wooden boards to divide one shop into dozens of small rooms with sofas, televisions, and VCRs. Taiwan thereby gained an industry found nowhere else: “venues for the screening of video program tapes”¹. At its peak in 1988, there were more than 600 such businesses across Taiwan². Young people could spend less than NT$100 on a ticket and watch Nagisa Oshima or Buñuel inside, while also escaping a father’s shout to “sit properly”²³. In 1992, the United States placed Taiwan on the “Special 301 Priority Retaliation List.” The unauthorized films from the eight major U.S. studios on which operators depended for survival were removed from the shelves overnight, and the leading “Solar System Audiovisual Center” was the first to pull down its metal shutters and post a notice reading “bargain sale, transfer of business”². On the same timeline, in March 1989, Liu Ying opened the first “Partyworld” on Linsen North Road in Taipei, putting karaoke into MTV’s private rooms. By the end of that year it had expanded to six locations, opening the next thirty years⁴⁵. Today, U2 in Ximending is still lit, but its Chengdu flagship, opened in 1987, went dark on August 30, 2022 after its lease expired, ending a 36-year history⁶⁷⁸. MTV was never only about watching movies. It was the first time Taiwanese people had a door outside the home that they could close.

From deep inside an ice-fruit parlor came the roar of Inoki facing Baba. At the next table, high school students ordered a plate of shaved ice, but their eyes were fixed on the narrow wooden partition behind the television. Behind that partition was another film that could not be screened in a movie theater. This was Taiwan in the late 1970s. Martial law had not yet ended, and audiences still had to stand and sing the national anthem before films in theaters. But someone had already discovered that putting a VCR inside an ice-fruit parlor was a business².

From Ice-Fruit Parlors to “Super-Sensibility”: The First Private Room Cut Out

A 1992 article in Taiwan Panorama, “The Storm of 301, Melancholy MTV,” left behind a clear genealogy: MTV originated in the ice-fruit parlors that screened Japanese violent wrestling videos in the 1970s². Under the dual censorship of material deemed “excessively pornographic and inconsistent with national conditions” and politically sensitive content, films by Nagisa Oshima, Buñuel, and Stanley Kubrick could not enter theaters. A group of cinephiles could only pool money to rent an empty office, “showing only two screenings a day, but every screening was packed.” This was the recollection of Liu Qiongsen, owner of “Yinglu,” in ROC year 71 (1982)². Yu Dacheng of the Tourism Bureau, Ministry of Transportation and Communications, remembered it even more concretely: “For a midnight film, my friends and I often had to go queue for tickets at nine o’clock”².

The one who truly turned this practice into “private rooms” was the “Super-Sensibility MTV Audiovisual Center,” which opened in 1985 (ROC year 74). The operator pioneered crude wooden partitions, placing a sofa, a television, and a VCR inside a small room to provide “a hidden space for personal audiovisual use”². Chen Kuan-Hsing, then an associate professor at National Tsing Hua University’s Graduate Institute of Literature, made a sharply accurate observation: “Our society’s demands on adolescents are stricter than in the West, so MTV became a space of escape. There, you could freely ‘laze’ on the sofa without inviting your old man’s shout to ‘sit properly’”².

📝 Curator’s note: The common account is that MTV became popular because of “movies.” But Taiwan Panorama wrote the 1985 Super-Sensibility case very clearly: it became popular because of “wooden boards.” The same videotapes, the same televisions: in 1982, Yinglu was only a small office screening. In 1985, adding a few sheets of plywood instantly turned it into an avoidance space for adolescents across Taiwan. The true invention of this industry was not content. It was “a door that could be closed.”

Behind That Door: Six Hundred Shops, Privacy, and Invisible Things

By 1988 (ROC year 77), there were more than 600 MTV operators across Taiwan². The content also expanded from early art films to ordinary commercial films, attracting consumers from different social strata². Wikipedia’s entry puts it plainly: compared with movie theaters, MTV private rooms “had a higher degree of privacy and freedom.” Groups of friends could make noise together, and “in a short time they immediately became the main leisure and entertainment venue for young students”¹.

But “a door that could be closed” had two sides. Early MTV private rooms were not prohibited from having locks. Young couples who could not afford hotels treated them as substitutes. They also became dark corners where sexual assault and sex work occurred. The government later banned locks on private rooms on public-safety grounds, but as late as 2007, Liberty Times was still reporting that “MTV private rooms easily become hotbeds of sexual assault”⁹¹.

In ROC year 77, the Government Information Office of the Executive Yuan amended the Enforcement Rules of the Radio and Television Act, bringing this industry, which previously lacked a legal basis, under regulation. By the end of April 1992, there were 108 legal MTV operators nationwide². The remaining several hundred fell into a gray zone between legality and illegality.

A NT$100 Ticket: A Luxury Students Could Afford

In a 1988 photograph retrieved by United Daily News Group’s “Time” archive, a young couple nestles into the sofa of an MTV private room. Two drinks and a cathode-ray television sit on the table³. The archive’s account states the price of that era plainly: “A NT$100 ticket let you enjoy a space to be alone.” This was almost the only form of “private space” consumption that students at the time could afford³.

That photograph, taken in September 1988 by United Daily News Group reporter Chen Bingkun, later became the representative image for the keyword “MTV Audiovisual Center” in the Time database¹⁰. It explains something often overlooked: MTV never sold only movies. It sold “cheap privacy.” A movie-theater ticket cost NT$150; a hotel room for a night cost several hundred. MTV used a sheet of plywood to press costs to the bottom, fitting perfectly into the pockets of high school and university students.

📝 Curator’s note: People who write industrial history like to discuss the 1992 Section 301 episode, but for high school students at the time, MTV’s real revolution was not copyright. It was price. In 1980s Taiwan, with parental control, limited pocket money, and strict dormitory curfews, “NT$100 for two hours of door” was a transaction difficult to reproduce. The later rise of KTV, internet cafes, motels, and small private cinemas was, in essence, a repetition of that transaction.

Solar System Pulls Down the Shutters: The “Coldest Spring” of 1992

On April 30, 1992, the U.S. government placed Taiwan on the “Special 301 Priority Retaliation List”². For MTV operators, this was a fatal blow. The unauthorized films from the eight major U.S. studios on which they “depended for survival” all had to be removed from the shelves. Unauthorized films outside the eight majors were also “almost completely swept away” under forceful government crackdowns².

The Taiwan Panorama reporter described Golden Laser Audiovisual Center that May: shelves that had originally held more than a thousand laserdiscs now had only about one hundred left. Several student-looking men and women poked their heads in, “shrugged, and turned away”². Yinglu owner Liu Qiongsen complained bitterly: “We can barely survive.” Monthly revenue had fallen by NT$600,000².

The reaction of “Solar System Audiovisual Center,” the leader of the MTV industry, was even more drastic: it directly pulled down its metal shutters and posted a notice reading “bargain sale, transfer of business.” General manager Wu Wenzhong said angrily that he would “sue the eight majors for infringing on the right to survival”². Attorney Chang Ching warned at the time: “MTV operators are intent on legalization. If objective conditions do not allow it, I think many operators may go underground”².

📝 Curator’s note: Many people remember MTV as having been “killed by piracy.” But that 1992 Taiwan Panorama report was actually about something else: MTV operators had always wanted to negotiate licensing with the U.S. majors, while “the eight majors did not acknowledge MTV’s status at all in the early period, so they refused to talk with operators”². What truly caused this industry to collapse was not that operators did not want to pay. It was that the business form was too strange: too large for movie theaters to tolerate, too small for the home market to charge. Copyright holders spent ten years without knowing how to price it.

On the Same Street, Liu Ying Put the Private Room Into a Jukebox

In the same era when Solar System pulled down its metal shutters, another videotape-store owner made the opposite bet. In March 1989, Liu Ying, who had originally operated a videotape rental store, opened the first “Partyworld” on Linsen North Road in Taipei, adopting a new model of “private-room karaoke”⁵.

Wikipedia’s entry describes this conversion clearly: in 1989, “some companies referred to the concept of karaoke, which was very popular in Japan, combining the entertainment function of karaoke accompaniment with the privacy features of MTV private rooms to launch the brand-new business model of ‘KTV’ (the term KTV was originally newly coined by combining the two terms Karaoke and MTV)”¹. Many original MTV operators slightly modified their existing equipment and converted to the KTV business model¹.

The shop on Linsen North Road became popular too quickly. By the end of 1989, Partyworld had already expanded to six locations in Taipei⁵. Liu Ying was able to gain a foothold because of “outstanding negotiating ability, which helped the company effectively control costs such as rent and copyright fees during expansion”⁴. This was precisely MTV operators’ most fatal weakness. In December 1994, Partyworld crossed the sea and opened its first branch in mainland China in Shanghai, exporting the combination of “MTV partition + karaoke” to major Chinese-speaking cities⁵. That same year, Partyworld launched Partyworld Magazine, whose monthly circulation surged to 120,000 copies, making it one of Taiwan’s entertainment monthlies with the highest readership at the time⁴⁵. A 2001 Business Today cover story, “Uncovering the Truth Behind Partyworld’s Mysterious Big Profits,” even directly portrayed it as one of the “best money-printing” cases in that generation of Taiwan’s consumer industries¹¹.

📝 Curator’s note: The difference between MTV and Partyworld was actually only one word: “sing.” While the U.S. majors charged licensing fees for “watching,” Liu Ying discovered that “singing” did not require Hollywood’s nod. Karaoke’s copyright structure was dispersed among record companies and lyric and composition rights holders. Operators could afford to pay, and they could negotiate. The private rooms, sofas, and televisions were the same. Once the industry moved from “playing other people’s images” to “releasing one’s own voice,” it leapt from a copyright cliff onto the wave of the next thirty years.

The Light Still On in Ximending

After the late 1990s, home LD players became widespread and cable television movie channels rose. “Fewer and fewer customers were willing to spend money at MTV venues”¹. By the time National Taiwan University of Arts’ “Taiwan Eighties” research project took stock of 1980s media scenes, MTV had already been written into the keyword archive for “mainstream media and diverse platforms”: a term from an era that needed to be recorded¹².

In “Once, There Was a Videotape Store: The Rise and Fall of Taiwan’s MTV,” Business Weekly alive positioned it as a youth that needed to be collected¹³. Business Weekly Management recorded how U2 turned its attention to tourists and after-school childcare groups, “overcoming the crisis of movies going online.” This was how private-room operators from the previous century grew new skin in this century¹⁴.

But the contraction was faster than imagined. In 1987, U2 Movie Theater’s first branch was established on Chengdu Road in the Ximending commercial district. At its height, it opened five branches in Taipei’s east district, west district, and Taichung⁸. On August 22, 2022, U2 posted an announcement on Facebook: “Because the Chengdu branch’s lease has expired, service will cease from August 30.” A 36-year sign went dark overnight⁷¹¹. Store manager Mr. Chen, interviewed by NOWnews on the eve of closure, said that the store closing did not mean the business was closing. “People who love watching movies will not change.” He urged longtime customers to move to the Wannian branch on the 9th floor of the Wannian Building and continue supporting it⁶⁸. Today, the 24-hour Wannian branch at 9F, No. 70, Xining South Road, Taipei, is the last sign left from the 1980s still lit in Ximending⁸.

The Private Room Was Never Only About Movies

Forty years later, that door that can be closed has become KTV private rooms, internet cafe booths, private cinemas, and Switch living rooms. The form keeps changing, but the desire to “have a small space outside that belongs only to oneself” has not changed.

The final sentence of Taiwan Panorama’s 1992 “Melancholy MTV” now reads almost like a prophecy: “Where is MTV’s tomorrow? Perhaps there is no answer yet”². Thirty years later, we can give an answer: MTV had no tomorrow, but its genes survived. The next time you close the door in a KTV private room, remember that this is the texture left behind by a sheet of plywood in 1985.

References