What could be cheaper than broadcasting content that other people produced, at zero cost to you? Problem is, just showing videos back to back like a radio station doesn't equal ratings, and no ratings means no advertising revenue.
They were addicted to the big budget videos and glorifying production costs at a time when special effects were still very expensive, but the benefit to doing that was inherently dropping since any artist that could expect millions more in increasingly cheaper CD sales had alternatives to an expensive Ad/giveaway.
That doesn't answer any question for me of whether the video medium was good or bad, clearly MTV's monopoly meant the only way to release videos was an economical disaster.
