Rank Film Distributors was a film distribution company owned by the Rank Organisation. It was created as General Film Distributors in 1935 by the British film distributor C. M. Woolf (1879–1942) after he had resigned from Gaumont British and closed his distribution company Woolf & Freedman Film Service. In 1936, J. Arthur Rank and the paper magnate Lord Portal convinced him to make it a daughter company to their General Cinema Finance Corporation, which just had acquired the British distribution rights for all Universal Pictures titles (by buying a large chunk of Universal in the US). One year later it became the cornerstone in The Rank Organisation. General Film Distributors kept its own name within the Rank Organisation until 1955, when it was renamed J. Arthur Rank Film Distributors, which in turn was renamed Rank Film Distributors Ltd. in 1957.

Tynes Tees Television was a television station based in the North East of England. The company opened its first Newcastle office at Bradburn House on Northumberland Street on 3 January 1958, with Anthony Jelly was appointed as the company's first managing director. Tyne Tees went on air for the first time at 5pm on 15 January 1959. Tyne Tees produced their own listings magazine called "The Viewer", which was published by News Chronicle. Initially produced from an office in Forth Lane, near to Newcastle Central station, it moved to the City Road studios when Dickens Press took over publication in 1963. The magazine became the biggest selling magazine in the region, with a circulation of 300,000 per week. New contracts issued by the ITA in 1968 stipulated that all ITV companies publish their listings in the TV Times, which became a national magazine with regional variations for the listings. The last issue of The Viewer was published in September 1968. A committee was established in 1960 under the leadership of British industrialist Sir Harry Pilkington to consider the future of broadcasting. The 1962 Pilkington Report criticised ITV, and Tyne Tees in particular. Following his report, Pilkington prompted the government to impose a levy on ITV's revenue, the effects of which were heightened by a recession in 1970. To ensure Tyne Tees' survival, the ITA allowed it to affiliate with Yorkshire Television under a joint management company named "Trident Television". Yorkshire and Tyne Tees then came under Trident's ownership on 1 January 1974. By the late seventies, Tyne-Tees's locally made programming amounted to an average of less than nine hours a week, with the remainder of programming from the ITV network. In 1978, The Economist reported that a group called Northumbria Television, partially financed by local firms Bellway Holding and Swan Hunter, applied to the IBA to take over the franchise from the "tired" Tyne Tees for the two and a half years until the scheduled franchise renewal in 1981. Yorkshire and Tyne Tees applied separately for renewal of the franchises in 1980, and each won. However, the two companies were required to demerge from January 1982 as a condition of the renewal of their ITV franchises. During the 1980s, Tyne Tees began to develop separate services for the Northern and Southern halves of the region. From a small two-camera studio at Corporation House in the centre of Middlesbrough, Tyne Tees developed nightly opt-out news bulletins for Teesside, County Durham and North Yorkshire as part of the flagship magazine programme Northern Life. The company also pioneered non-news programming for the two sub-regions, including the nightly Epilogues, which ended a 29-year run in September 1988 when Tyne Tees commenced 24-hour broadcasting.