BBC West Midlands schedule - and "Midlands Today" in 1964, one of the UK's first daily regional news programmes. Regional television had been established in 1957 with the launch of local evening news bulletins. Although it fared better than the struggling BBC North or BBC West (which was threatened for a while with being absorbed by the Midlands Region), it was clear that if BBC Midlands was too large to be truly local in the radio market, it was equally too small to be as self-sufficient across the full range of television programming as it had been in radio. The result was the
BBC Studios income received through the licence fee. In exchange, the BBC agreed to tender its current programming to allow third-party independent studios to produce them on behalf of the BBC. The formal establishment of BBC Studios as a commercial entity occurred in April 2017. In April 2018, BBC Worldwide was merged into the company, to make it both a distributor and producer of programmes, in line with other major multinational studio conglomerates. BBC News and BBC Radio remain separate internal production divisions in the BBC (although BBC Radio Comedy is part of Studios), and the rest of the former BBC Television