WOW, I never thought I’d see that old MTN News intro again, thanks @Mechsta! They pretty much kept with that look until a few years after they became WIN.
MTN did have local idents, though they were rather basic - a typical one would start with the Nine ident but before the Nine logo would appear, a local (Griffith/Leeton/possibly Hay) photo with the dotted MTN logo would be zoomed-out to be overlaid over the ident - so it wasn’t a customised version like WIN and NBN received. They kept using this style of ident at least until the supplementary “Prime” channel started in 1996 (I think they gave up once they had two channels to deal with).
But oddly, they didn’t play them at all hours - they’d typically use them in the afternoon and evening, but the rest of the time they idented as “WIN”, as they were essentially running on a dirty feed. All program promos and (most?) PRGs were just the dirty feed’s “WIN” ones too. Advert playout during the day was always local, though.
I’m not sure where the feed for WIN came from - the feed for Prime came via Orange (the old Mid-State TV link) and it’s possible WIN was fed this way too, but that presumes WIN didn’t bother splitting their southern NSW feed, as I always suspected that the WIN feed came from the Wagga station.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they ever got autocue to be honest (memory doesn’t serve me well on that). They never had headlines or over-the-shoulder graphics during this era - besides the constant “MTN/WIN News” one - the only real change besides the change to “WIN” was circa 2004 when they ditched the constant OTS and changed to a lighter background with a big “WIN” logo in the background.
The lack of OTS is almost a backward step from those tapes from 1979 also up on YouTube, where the slide machine would at least change the background from story to storyt…