In the early 1950s the British Government decided that the British Broadcasting Corporation needed competition, and that the most cost-effective way to provide this was to invite the private sector to tender for the privilege to broadcast, being funded entirely by advertising revenue. However there were concerns from on high aswell as from the general public that commercial television would be crass, tasteless and belief that moral standards would be eroded by the potential for blatant materialism and that pressure from advertisers would make editorial independence on the part of programme makers, impossible.
However the 1951 Broadcasting Act was drawn up to put in place a mechanism for commercial television that would retain, at its top levels, a BBC-like organisation to control, license and monitor the independent companies that would produce the programmes. This body, the Independent Television Authority (ITA) was to become a publically-owned body responsible for building and maintaining the transmission infrastructure and also for awarding the licenses, or 'franchises' to give the right to bidding companies or consortia to form the face and substance of each regional station. Such franchises were seen as highly lucrative because at that time in Britain there was no other means by which advertisers could spread their messages via any kind of electronic audio-visual means. The Government had long realised the power this would give any organization to be in control of, and that to allow any one company to run a television network would create an enormous monopoly, and it is for this reason that the commercial television network was tendered on a regional basis, with the ITA maintaining strict rules for how much presence any one company could have within the network, and even how many controlling shares companies could have in any given consortia, where franchise applicants were jointly-owned.
In 1973 Independent Television was joined by Independent Local Radio (ILR), starting with Capital Radio in London and the ITA's remit was expanded to cover ILR also - and to reflect this, its name was changed to the Independent Broadcasting Authority, or IBA. The Authority, in both its guises, made its presence known by its logo appearing on various testcards and transmitter service cards that formed part of each ITV companies' morning startup routines. These were not just graphical devices; they signified a formal handover between the Authority and its transmitters to the company licensed to feed content onto them. In theory, the Authority had the right to instantly pull the plug on any material they deemed inappropriate; in practice this never happened, but through rigorous monitoring, discussion and written feedback from the Authority, coupled with the ever-hanging threat that a franchise would not necessarily be renewed with the incumbent contractor, made sure that each programme company was kept on its toes and to a point, self-regulating.The IBA regularly transmitted short programmes of Engineering Information, initially on down-hours on the ITV network, but moving to Channel 4 in 1982 to take advantage of the large amounts of empty airtime then available on the fledgling network. The Authority continued to have a hand in overseeing the application process for satellite services in the UK until the late 1980s, where BSB (its original incarnation before Sky and Granada invested in it) was the final broadcasting organization to have to face the IBA gateway.