One of the more successful examples of commercially viable traveler information in the United States comes from content providers to radio and television stations. The content providers depend upon several different communications media to successfully deliver their products to their traveling audience. This paper examines how one provider, Shadow Broadcast Services, gathers traffic information, shapes that information into commercial service products, and then disseminates the information through various distribution channels - both wireless and terrestrial - in 12 major metropolitan markets in the United States. The authors show how Shadow Broadcast takes a "market driven" approach to satisfying the needs of the traveling public for traffic information. The paper includes a discussion of the market profile of the traveler and the markets traffic content providers serve, their use of advertising sponsorships revenues to pay for the generation of traveler information, and the various methods of distributing traveler information through radio, television, audio text, and personal digital assistants.
Abstract