OK, you're trying to refute my assertions by interpreting my comments as (a) portraying these acts as having been dominant on MTV from the start, and (b) dismissing US acts like Van Halen as being behind and bad at video, and suggesting that there were zero US acts making concept videos then. I'm doing neither, and I'm certainly not dissing Van Halen, or performance videos! I'd only point out that Van Halen's videos in 1981 for So This Is Love [1] and Unchained [2] were very basic compared to the ones they started making from 1982 and particularly from 1984, after MTV got up and running. But I'm not making value judgements about any of it, I'm just commenting on an interesting thing that was going on in Australia in the years before MTV started.

What I'm really pointing out is that these emerging Australian/NZ acts only got any MTV airplay at all because they were already quite adept in the art of music video, and were well positioned to take advantage of this new platform, which is surprising for a region so small, remote, and not normally known for cultural innovation.

In the case of Split Enz, they are in the very video we're talking about – twice. They were the 10th act ever played on MTV. They wouldn't have been there if they didn't have good videos already made. Several of their later videos also earned airplay on MTV, and their successor band Crowded House built on this to achieve some major US chart success in 86-87.

Re. Men at Work, their profile on Allmusic states "Their funny, irreverent videos became MTV favorites, helping send "Who Can It Be Now?" and "Down Under" to number one."

INXS may not have seemed very visible on MTV in the early days to you (I assume you're basing these arguments on your own recollections), but they were absolutely there, and there's a direct path from their first appearances in 82-83 to the huge success of Kick a few years later. Of 1982/3's The One Thing, Wikipedia [3] (sourced from their 2005 autobiography) says "The music video was their first video to air on the fledgling MTV and went into high rotation on the channel, which added to the chart success of the single in the US." (That track made it to #30 in the Billboard Hot 100 and #2 on Billboard Top Tracks).

If you use Google Books to search for "MTV" in that autobiography [4], you can read how their management was very deliberate and strategic in leveraging their existing repertoire of music videos to get on MTV soon after it launched, to tour the US extensively off the back of the profile they were building via MTV, and ride that all the way to the top with Kick only four years later.

I'm not insisting that INXS's early videos are masterpieces - clearly they're not. But they were a continuation of a trend that had been building in Australia since 1974, and the band was surrounded by people who understood the format and the industry trends very well by then, so when MTV arrived they were good to go.

But also, from reading about Countdown [5] now, I'm reminded it wasn't just about AU/NZ acts getting their start. Countdown was a platform where several US/European acts found early success, leading to later signings and/or chart success in the bigger markets. Blondie, Abba, Meatloaf, John Mellencamp and Bob Scaggs are some of the acts that found success in Australia earlier than elsewhere, thanks to Countdown, and presumably it helped at least some of them learn about the music video medium earlier than others. Talking Heads appeared live on Countdown in 1981, and Once In a Lifetime charted much better in Australia than in the US. Indeed, one of Van Halen's first ever TV interviews was for Countdown, filmed in London in 1978 [6].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfxG7BRn7xs

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojNrj-sWfpk

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One_Thing_(song)

[4] https://books.google.com.au/books?redir_esc=y&id=MxTMEwwCIK8...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countdown_(Australian_TV_progr...

[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ymyADifQtA