Viewers look after their own
Ofcom report

ITV has previously claimed that viewers just aren't interested in regional output anymore apart from news and sport, hence it has wound down much of the old regional ITV infrastructure; the end result being that ITV's output is now more or less identical across England and Wales, despite some strong regional differences in programme preferences.

Of course if ITV had realised this basic fact earlier on it could have exploited these regional preferences to maximum effect by showing a different mix of programmes in different regions, pleasing both viewers and advertisers with a unique and compelling proposition that no other broadcaster apart from the BBC could ever hope to match.

Instead ITV has to try and compete head on with other broadcasters with one fixed schedule that has to go down the path of least resistance so as not to lose too many viewers, but instead ends up pleasing fewer people for less of the time. A regional system also means that programmes can be tested in specific regions before being unleashed on the whole network.

But ITV has thrown most of this potential away simply because it was forced to listen to its accountants as a result of making some bad business decisions as well as convincing itself that the old regional system was just an expensive duplication of resources, hence it was inevitable that large and underused regional studios would be high on the list of asset disposals.

National promotional campaigns would still be possible with careful planning even for a network with a greater percentage of regional content, just as they were twenty years ago and is still the case in the USA. Regionality isn't the only thing that ITV has judged wrongly it seems, and it probably won't be the last either.

What a lost opportunity.