ITV are now eyeing up STV

What if they revive the Grampian brand?

Bring STV to heel first then sell the lot. And no, we won't see ITV become Fox.

I will come back

Doubtful anyone would be willing to spend £200 million just to keep a company "Scottish"

Tax reasons? Amazon or Apple is tech Irish..

Yes, of course people in Peebles, 22 miles from the capital of Scotland, love hearing about events in Keswick and Cockermouth and the latest about Workington rugby league and Carlisle United..

I think it's more a case, would those viewers hope that if STV does get bought by ITV, and there are changes to news boundaries, that they can still get news about the Borders in their bulletins, certainly the same quantity of coverage.

Is it not the case though that pretty much every TV region has areas on its periphery where people would choose to receive a different service if it wasn’t for the local topography making it impossible?

I think it's fair to say when STV disposed on it's local STV2 channels many people on these forums suspected it was done in part to make itself more attractive for a takeover by ITV Plc. If/when it happens maybe it'll be time for Ofcom to change the channel 3 licences to just one licence for each nation, with a requirement of x hours of regional/nation focused content.

Indeed.

Unless you happen to be lucky enough to live fairly centrally within a particular region's broadcast patch, you're gonna have an unbalanced skew of news.

For example... Henley-on-Thames viewers (on DTT, at least) are cut off from hearing news about the rest of Oxfordshire, but get to hear about news from as far southeast as parts of Kent! A region has got to begin and end somewhere, so such anomalies are unavoidable.

No solution is ideal. Viewers in Eyemouth may prefer to hear about Berwick-upon-Tweed rather than Tobermory, Inverness or Whitehaven. And I doubt that viewers in Stranraer care about news from Eyemouth. You can't please everyone.

Yep - I used to live in Harrogate, 15 miles from Leeds, and yet because there’s a big hill which blocks out signals from Emley Moor to the town, most people with an aerial there get their regional news from Newcastle, 80 miles away. Until all TV is delivered by satellite or IP, it’s just the way it is unfortunately.

It'd be interesting to see how regions would be fully rationalised in such a scenario.

For example... Would the Look East (west) / Anglia West region be abolished, with different parts of it being variously added to E Midlands, East (Norwich), London, and South/Thames Valley?

At the very least, anomalies like N-NW Norfolk getting "Hull" news rather than Norwich could be rectified.