I get asked this question a lot by long time South Beach locals….. so here it is, but first a little backstory.

Miami Beach has its own cable tv system, and back in the early 2000’s, a time when most of Miami nightlife and tourism revolved around South Beach, it was called Atlantic Broadband (Now Breezeline). When you turned on a hotel TV, it defaulted to Channel 3, which was nothing but mostly a loop of infomercials and direct-response ads like Girls Gone Wild & the Sham-wow guy.

It was empty, forgotten real estate.

I kept seeing it and thought, “Why not fill this with something that actually belongs in Miami?”

Then I went to Ibiza.

In those days, MTV in the United States barely played music videos, especially not electronic music. The word EDM was not in use, and David Guetta had not yet made songs with Akon that would precede a flood of dance hits climbing the pop charts years later. In Ibiza, I turned on the TV and saw Viva, a channel that played dance and electronic music videos, DJ interviews, lifestyle pieces, and club culture. It reminded me of Night Flight, the old late-night block on USA Network that mixed weird music videos, short films, and experimental content.

Viva had that same atmosphere, a flow. You could watch it or just let it ride in the background. Europe had limitless music videos that would never get airtime in the United States, and meanwhile, in Miami, Channel 3 sat unused every night.

The idea clicked.

When I got back, I asked Atlantic Broadband if I could buy hours of airtime instead of little 60-second spots. It turned out the block from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. was cheap. It was not technically a TV channel, but I began referring to it as one because it was completely self-contained block of programming, away from the rest of the signal. They gave me 30 days to pay, I took the invoice and said “See you then!”.

I partnered with Miami local and friend Dave Mardini and called every dance label I had ever met at Winter Music Conference. I said, “If you have music videos, send them.” Then I went to every club and sponsor I knew from the magazine world and told them, “I’ll shoot your commercials, do a feature, put you on the air and a few of them bit.”

We had airtime. We had some music videos. What we didn’t have was the right look.

Enter Luciano Alexander

The early videographers we hired were news shooters. Everything looked like a press conference, clean, flat, lifeless. Then we met a crazy Romanian named Luciano Alexander.

Luciano could turn anything into a music video, a pool party, a yacht run, a photoshoot, a random night in a club. He understood rhythm, movement, and mood. He could cut to the beat in a way that actually felt like nightlife.

He also had a habit of filming the hottest girls, and I nicknamed him the “Ass Master” for reasons that would become inherently clear. For late-night South Beach television, that was an “ass-et.”

With Luciano, A3 finally looked the way it was supposed to.

Because hotel TVs defaulted to Channel 3, anyone turning on their TV at night saw us. We named the channel A3, short for Alternative TV 3, later A3, The Nightlife Network.

Six years of nonstop nightlife

For 6 years, Every night from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m., viewers saw nonstop electronic and dance music videos, South Beach nightlife, Halloween, New Year’s, and big seasonal events like Winter Music Conference and Ultra, along with DJ interviews, girls dancing, pool parties and sexy edits of whatever we found interesting…..its a lot like the modern social media feeds of today, but not as easily scrollable.

It wasn’t traditional television. It was something you put on when you got home from the club and wanted to keep the night alive, more like a vibe.

Being a local media guy, I already knew many club owners, promoters, and restaurant people. At the time, cameras weren’t common in nightclubs, but we were allowed everywhere, mansion parties, pool parties, DJ shows.

We made segments like VIP FOR THE NIGHT, where we took the guy from the back of the line and threw a table and women at him. Enigmatic door lord Fabrizio gave weird fashion or dating advice, or read to kids, cooked hot dogs. It was random, it was weird, it was glorious.… We covered photo shoots, hot body contests, cooking segments, and short films, always searching for cool visuals to match with music.

Andy Ruffell enters the picture

After Luciano came Andy Ruffell.

Andy was already a figure in the UK music and TV world. He co-created the European MOBO and DanceStar Awards, a global electronic music awards property that wanted to bring the international dance scene into American media, although it was a bit early for the market. We had the same mission, get electronic music on American screens. He became a partner to help grow the channel.

Around the same time, I was the Promotions Director for Party 93.1, Cox Radio’s short-lived pop-dance station on a major FM signal. It helped with access to DJs and events, and my life became a constant rotation of radio events, A3 shoots, DJ dinners, after-hours filming, and nonstop editing.

A life-changing moment

In 2003 we filmed a lingerie party. In the footage, Luciano captured a shot of a girl in almost completely see-through lingerie, smiling at the camera and saying she was “very shy.” I would not actually speak to her myself until 6 years later in 2009.

In 2012, I married her. A3TV literally changed my life.

YouTube and the changing landscape

With the launch of YouTube in 2006, we were among the first channels to upload large amounts of content.

We had a short run with some mainland airtime, but TV was already changing. Smartphones were rising. Online video was becoming dominant. The landscape was shifting under our feet.

Not long after, Comcast took over sales for the local channels around South Florida. The cheap direct-access airtime disappeared almost overnight. Our business model, a late-night channel built on affordable hotel-default cable blocks, ceased to exist.

The era of the late-night cable channel filled with thonged asses and bouncing DJs was closing and moving to social media.

The legacy lives on

We ended our broadcasts around 2008, but even then people were downloading our videos, syncing them to DJ mixes, and using them as visual background loops in bars and lounges around the world. Friends would message me from Thailand or Chile saying they recognized A3 footage in random bars. At one point, it was the most pirated channel on YouTube, and it generated more than 2.4 billion views, just not on our channel. LOL.

The Story: A War You Don’t See Coming

Now the archive lives on YouTube. It is a time capsule of South Beach before smartphones turned nightlife into a nonstop feed.

A3TV existed in a narrow, unrepeatable window. Electronic music was exploding globally, but American TV had no space for it. South Beach was the cultural nucleus of Miami. YouTube was new. Smartphones had not taken over and Atlantic Broadband’s odd little system created a loophole.

We slipped through that loophole and made a channel that looked and felt like Miami nightlife. When technology changed, the need for that channel disappeared.

But for 6 years, from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. on Channel 3, we created something unique. A3TV became the lens through which locals and visitors saw Miami at night. It captured a version of the city that no longer exists.

And it still lives online, exactly as it looked back then.

Check it out, maybe you will see some familiar faces: https://www.youtube.com/@a3tvmiami