Known as "the father of MTV," at 27 Robert Pittman created the programming for MTV—the Music Television cable network—launched in 1981. MTV revitalized the music business and spawned the music video industry, which in turn influenced an entire new generation of television programming production, and commercials that appealed to "the MTV generation" of young viewers. 

Pittman, born on December, 28 1953, began his remarkable career at 15 as a disk jockey in radio in his home town of Jackson, Mississippi. Pittman duplicated the phenomenal success of WMAQ-AM when he was given the responsibility of programming WMAQ’s co-owned FM station, WKQX, late in 1975, when he was 22. In 1977, NBC sent Pittman to New York to program the floundering WNBC-AM. Once again the "Boy Wonder," as he was known in radio circles, led contemporary music and personality formatted WNBC programming to the top of the ratings in its target groups. Many knowledgeable radio programmers and historians consider Pittman to have been the most successful radio program director ever, primarily because of his spectacular success in a variety of formats.

It was this creative/analytic brilliance that led John Lack, the Executive Vice President of Warner Satellite Entertainment Company (WASEC) to hire Pittman as the programmer for the Movie Channel in 1979 and give him his first television job. Although Lack had conceived of doing an all-music channel filled with programs, it was Pittman who develops the concept of an all video channel, where record-company-produced videos would be programmed as records were on a radio station. 

From the inception, Pittman’s genius was positioning MTV to be different from the over-the-air, traditional networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC). He hired cutting-edge, "avant garde" production houses to create logos that would be instantaneously recognizable as not network-logos, as not traditional graphics or symbols or icons, and as not the network of any young person’s parents. The new television generation, he believed, processed TV in a non-linear manner, processing visual information much faster than the older, non-TV generation, processing it non-sequentially, non-linearly, without being confused by brief, disjointed images. Still another facet of Pittman’s genius was his business savvy. MTV was the first basic cable network to become profitable. The record companies paid for the programming—the video—just as they gave radio stations their records. MTV’s programming content was virtually free.

The combination of business acumen and programming astuteness led to Pittman’s being named CEO of the MTV networks in 1983. In 1987 Pittman left MTV after an unsuccessful attempt to buy out the network and co-founded Quantum Media with MCA. Quantum Media produced The Morton Downey Show, a television talk show and the innovative police documentary, The Street. Quantum Media was sold to Time-Warner in 1989, and Pittman became and executive assistant to Steve Ross.