MTV | Steven Smith | Midtown Manhattan studio | Franz Ferdinand

Remember when there was a cable channel that played music videos? There still is one. It's called Fuse.
Franz Ferdinand blazes through six songs in a cramped Midtown Manhattan studio. It's your typical MTV scene - teenagers singing along, fists pumping, cameras swiveling to catch it all - only it's not MTV. This is Fuse, the Cablevision-owned music channel poised to place a chink in that other channel's teenage monotony - I mean monopoly. ¶ "This ain't your mother's music television," says VJ Steven Smith as he films outros for the commercial break. He also adds a cuss word, but I'll leave out that part.

Now that MTV has become reality-show central and VH1 is the nostalgia channel for TV-addicted­ adults, there's only one thing missing: actual music. "Empty-vee" was the slogan Fuse came up with a few years ago. They're good at that kind of irreverence. One Fuse ad showed Sally Struthers on a Save-the-Children-type poster that read, "Every day thousands of music videos go unplayed." Fuse has been around for a while - it used to be called MuchMusicUSA - but now the company is throwing its muscle behind a campaign to increase the channel's visibility and make its way into teenagers' hearts and iPods.

"We want to be wherever kids are, whenever they want us," says Catherine Mullen, the channel's new general manager, who came to Fuse from MTV UK.

To that extent, Fuse is almost hysterically interactive, beginning with its massive website. Kids can also text the new sign outside the studio on Seventh Avenue, and their messages may appear on the ticker. The channel's countdown show, Daily Download, doesn't merely run through the most popular videos (although it does do that); it counts down the nation's most downloaded songs (thus the name).