General TV History

And also ATN7 Sydney…from what I read elsewhere, it apparently came from an American news package called Action News is Everywhere.

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Remember the days of the Moomba Birdman Rally on TV. Used to love watching it as a kid each year. Used to be on Channel 0/10.

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New upload - late edition of Seven Nightly News with David Johnston as seen in Brisbane on a Friday night in August 1996. The short bulletin followed a movie and was followed by a very late start for that night’s AFL game.

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I really enjoyed this. Wednesday nights late I think…

NBC Today show at the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

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Some screenshots from GWN7’s 50 Years reports this week…

<img src="//mediaspy-org-s3.s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/original/3X/4/1/410c0e301bfc6476067aed714af1d60f22918c5a.jpg"width="652">

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GWN News used to be very slick in the late 80’s, 90’s and early 2000’s. Almost metro quality.

MTN9 news bulletin from 1992. Audio quality is a bit shot but still, a very rare find.

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Very interesting - I’d seen just single images of that dotty MTN logo - but never from actual on air footage. That news opener makes me wonder what other Nine visuals they got modified for them - presumably they wouldn’t have been able to make that in house.

There’s another video on that channel with a bit more of the content, in slightly worse quality.

I wonder how many other old regional bulletins exist only in family archives like that one.

Wow, still no autocue by 1992! Although that doesn’t really surprise me for MTN.

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It was this day, 12 March, in 1982 that the TV Week Logie Awards were on, hosted by Bert Newton and presented live from the Hilton Hotel in Melbourne.

This was the opening of that awards and I think it was the first Logie awards presentation I watched in its entirety. (I’d only seen the 1980 awards in part and I was on a cub camp the night of the 1981 awards. A camp that I thoroughly hated and at the time all I wanted on the Friday night was to be home to see the Logies :blush: )

The opening montage featured Katrina Lee who of course was an unknown in Melbourne at that time but me and my brother would mock “and I’m Katrina Lee” based on that one-second snippet in this montage. I was a very mature 10 year old :stuck_out_tongue:

YouTube: aussiebeachut

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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…

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Wow so much to take in from that Logies opener

  • They don’t make montages as good as that anymore, complete with orchestra
  • They don’t make great TV theme tunes anymore
  • On Celebrity Squares, were they really on top of each other, or just filmed in a straight line and superimposed? I’ve always wondered that
  • We need a few more soaps on Aussie TV. God bless The Sullivans.

News reports about GWN7’s 50th:

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Awesome stories. Thanks for posting

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I do recall seeing a videotape of off air reception of MTN from 1991 that was very snowy (received at West Wyalong) that showed MTN using their own PRG’s during the “Sunday” program. Nine or WIN didn’t use PRG’s for that program from memory.

I did see WIN Griffith in April 2006 on a visit to Leeton and noticed that they were still doing locally based presentation (this was a few months before it was centralised). The timing of ad breaks was incorrect on some occasions. I saw that they missed the “Sunday” opener because of an ad break that ran over time. They were also still using ads with just text on a colour background like they were years before then. Plus all their own presentation was still being done in 4:3 aspect ratio, whereas the WIN network feed was in 14:9. The digital transmissions were transmitted like that, no doubt looking bad on the still new widescreen TVs back then. Very amateur hour TV.

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Flashback Natalie Barr


Nat’s tweet
Happy 50th birthday @GWN7News Thanks for the lessons in life and work.

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Yes, it is Dr. Karl. Remember his time on the show well.

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In that era, before MTN had their supplementary channel, did they carry any Seven or Ten programming apart from major sports events such as AFL, Bathurst, Olympic and Commonwealth Games?

When MTN took on the WIN feed from Christmas 1989 onwards, it was solely Nine Network. With of course the exception of Seven and Ten big events like the AFL, Motor sport, Olympics and Melbourne Cup. I think they may have still closed overnight for a few more years whereas the main WIN service was 24 hours.

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