26th Anniversary of the biggest shake up in ITV

While you're at it, separate South & South East, East & West Midlands and Wales & West. Indeed, a single London franchise and no breakfast franchise too but presumably Granada would've had a heart attack over the prospect of an all-London ITV company back in 1991.

Yikes

Itv was a mess and was only designed because of the where transmitter were placed. 12 mainland areas could have been designed better.

How?

Well, if you completely ignore how expensive it is to build a TV transmitter, and all the issues with limited amounts of RF spectrum being available (which involves ignoring a fair few laws of physics), then you could easily build a transmission system which is based on postcode rather than nearest hill.

I apologise. I misread the statement.

Back to Granada and the perceived Manchester bias was the idea of a dual region ever considered with one half centred in Liverpool. Obviously they're off the same transmitter generally but we've seen with local TV the signal could be split.

In fairness to Granada, for a few years their news output came from Liverpool, not Manchester.

[quote="Riaz" pid="1110680"]

Ignoring the politicians, who generally went down the usual tribal independence party lines on Border (Yes = move it in with STV, No = keep it as it is), from previous experience many locals seemed to want to keep things as they were the last time this came up. The reasoning being that the Scottish borders would just be swamped and relatively uncovered by STV, whereas they got some coverage during Lookaround.

Basically, a choice between being a big fish in a small bowl or a small fish in a big bowl.

Nothing ever serious, I don't think. You could have separate directionally beamed PBS muxes from Winter Hill with relays merely repeating the appropriate version, if the frequencies could be found. Indeed, Storeton carries the Wales PBS muxes as well as the Granada ones. It'd cost money, of course but probably more useful to Liverpool than the local TV experiment has been.

I doubt ITV would care for it these days. The BBC might set up a sub-opt within the existing North West region but probably only if politically bounced into it.

The regions were a combination of the physics of radio propagation, population, and local identity.

I agree with you that the territories of regions could have been designed better by more careful transmitter placement. Border was a kludge although p_c_u_k makes a valid point about Lookaround and how the Scottish Borders could be just as ignored by the news gatherers from the Glasgow centric STV as they were by the London centric BBC.

The reason why I mentioned the South Midlands and Thames Valley region was a result of the movement of the population and the economy southwards since the 1950s, and how Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, and Berkshire identify themselves as southern counties but with a different identity from the south coast. Their residents would see a stronger connection with each other, and possibly London, than with Birmingham and Southampton.

It won't happen, it's tight enough now with 700 MHz clearance removing even more spectrum.

Ironically, the best and most effective way to regionally target the right viewers is postcode mapping on D-Sat.