[DTV]

I did see some comments on Twitter suggesting that merging Oxford with London would be a better fit as it's commuter belt territory, and feels little in common with the South Coast

I'm not sure the Oxford region would be particularly well served by being included in the already oversized London region. While it is definitely more similar in profile to the commuter belt part of that region than to the South Coast area, a lot of people in the commuter belt tend to feel underserved by BBC London which is often seen to have a clear Greater London skew despite nearly half its service audience being outside the capital. I expect Oxford stories will be more likely to get covered on South Today, particularly during the first few months as Southampton will certainly want to demonstrate that they aren't leaving Oxford viewers behind.

The ideal situation would certainly be for DTT to disappear so regional boundaries could be redefined based on something more sensible than the reach of a transmitter network that was largely installed before regional news was really a thing. But to be quite honest, there are several things that you'd do completely differently if you were starting the BBC regional news network from scratch.