With regard to the answer by Andrew H.
This is kind of on the right lines if Virgin Media/BBC etc.. keeps the same policy, however:
1. The regional feeds to Virgin Media I believe are line fed, so nothing to do with transmitters, apart from Virgin Media seem to select the local TV region that the local head end is in, even if a substantial part of an area served by a local head end is in another BBC/ITV region.
2. In both the cases referred to I believe that no regional changes were made - this is how it has been for years - the Brighton area did have a change from BBC South to BBC South East which did cause an anomaly as the "Sussex coast" regional head end is in the Brighton area, causing places such as Worthing to get the "wrong" news as Worthing is BBC south region, but is in the sussex coast (Brighton/BBC south east) Virgin Media area - as per original cable franchise provided by Nynex.
3. The BBC clearly blame Virgin's platform for this, VM blame the channel providers. Who's correct?
4. The original franchise areas which determines where the local head end is had absolutely nothing to do with regions - there has always been these kinds of anomalies though I do believe that dual broadcasts of different regions on VM were minimised in the switch from analogue to digital cable.
5. Judging by the "extra" bandwith to be used for the olympic HD/SD feeds, there seems to be no technical reason that VM could not have all regions provided to and selected by the user, or at least some of them on a 2 or 3 regions per area basis.
6. Here's a suggestion Virgin Media. Why not negotiate the supply of all regional news programmes to the on demand service - we already have BBC Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales news on on demand - why not the rest? I know there is some policy/rights reasons to be overcome as some of these will not be matching a service supplied "live", but we do have BBC Alba programmes on demand even though that channel is not carried throughout the U.K. on Virgin Media, and of course all regions are carried free to air on satellite.
7. Switchover is nearly complete - freeview reception is now good in most places - most tv's now have freeview built in. In a lot of areas, simple antennas such as can be found in certain single price stores (you know where I mean!!), in many cases will pick up a good signal, so can be used easily to pick up the regional channel as required, so if you really want to see your local regions news if VM does not provide it, then it is getting much less difficult to do so via freeview.