Originally Posted by Tim_Bishop:
“From my understanding from talking to ex-colleagues working within ITV. the long term plan is to merge the local programming for Westcountry and West into 1 super news programme. when this happens the westcountry will then get its own HD variant.
what i mean with this is : at the moment, you currently have West Country West (former westcountry tv area) and West Country East (former HTV). i.e. 2 SD feeds. they are planning to merge both east and west feeds to be still broadcast at Bristol. when Ofcom approves this move they will then give us the localised HD variant.”
They've only just committed in the last three weeks to Ofcom to providing a separate news service for West & Westcountry as part of their licence renewal, as part of the reinstatements of some regional news programmes.

West & Westcountry will be merged together for a licencing point of view, following the separation of the HTV West and Wales regions effective 1st Jan 2015.
Central has two regional news versions, with one of them in HD, so the existence of two sub-regions should be no issue. Meridian has a similar set-up.