Trident was set up in August 1970 to deal with the problem of fairly allocating commercial airtime from a television transmitter at Bilsdale in North Yorkshire which straddled the catchment areas of two Independent Television (ITV) companies. The transmitter itself was owned by the Independent Television Authority (ITA), the governing body of ITV. Due to the geographical nature of the area it served, allocating the transmitter to either of the two closest broadcasting companies, Yorkshire Television and Tyne Tees Television, would have given one an advantage over the other in terms of selling commercial airtime.