More important was MTV's lead role in capturing the baby boom generation - 76 million men and women born from 1946 through 1964 - that was destined to dominate popular culture in the decade. In the '80s, the mass market would fragment into many markets as television and magazines learned the art radio had already mastered, of reaching isolated, specifically defined audiences with products tailored to their interests. The same year MTV began, Walter Cronkite relinquished his position as CBS News anchor and most trusted man in America, taking with him the idea of America as one community nurtured by a single culture. It was, among other things, affirmation of how new technologies could change the very nature of mass entertainment's appeal. Today, MTV is secure in its status as the emblematic innovation of the 1980s, perhaps the most influential single cultural product of the decade. "I was in the right place at the right time, and I had a big checkbook." Initially carried over cable systems so patchwork that the service's Manhattan staff had to be bused across the Hudson River to a bar in Fort Lee, N.J., to watch the launch, Music Television would eventually be available in more than 48 million American homes. "It was an idea whose time had come," Lack says today. Lack, then executive vice president of Warner-Amex Satellite Entertainment Co., a joint venture formed with far more money than certainty of how to go about exploiting the cable television revolution everyone knew was at hand. The owner of the voice and the inventor of MTV was John A. 1, 1981, "Rock and roll." So began Music Television, known from the start as MTV. "Ladies and Gentlemen," intoned the voice in a baritone relayed by satellite to about 2.5 million cable television subscribers at 12:01 a.m. NEW YORK - The decade of image and celebrity was rung in, ironically, by an anonymous television programmer.
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