It’s a long time, isn’t it? For a business serving the technological and media sectors, it’s a very long time!
It all started in December 2000, answering an advertisement in Cardiff’s Western Mail, I was fortunate enough to get a broadcaster position at what was then, Metro Networks.
My two weeks’ broadcaster training ended abruptly when, on the second day at 6 o’clock in the morning, the studio manager said my trainer was ill and wouldn’t be in and could I go live on the BBC? On my second day! Well, of course I said yes and hopefully I made an okay job of it. At least, I don’t think we had any complaints! For the record, our contingency plans are somewhat more sophisticated these days.
At that time, we also had travel broadcasters in light aircraft. Using an “uplink” to the plane, we would give them incident information that they couldn’t see from the air –which given the UK weather, was most of the time. We then controlled their audio bulletin coming back down from the plane and then played it out live on the radio stations. As you can probably imagine, that was all a bit frantic at times.
Local radio was genuinely “local” in those days, with numerous independent radio stations serving audiences across the U.K. How times have changed over the years, with now just a handful of radio station groups dominating the airwaves. Thankfully for us, and with technology allowing, we have maintained very local traffic & travel bulletins for these large radio giants.
Metro soon became Trafficlink, before being acquired by Itis, which in turn, was acquired by INRIX in 2011. I remember how exciting it was to become part of a larger international business.
It was a great experience managing our media teams and supporting our customers during the London 2012 Olympics. There was real satisfaction in knowing we were helping both the public and visitors to the UK stay on the move around the Capital and at other Olympic events taking place across the country.
At some point along the way, I was promoted to manage our entire media and incident operations teams. This was around 200 people at one point, so it made sense for my longstanding colleague, Bryn Mills, to take responsibility of the incidents gathering team, while I focused on leading the broadcaster team and managing our relationships with UK media customers.
Those customers have remained extremely happy with the service we have provided over the years; thanks to exceptional broadcast delivery and outstanding technical uptime. This is a testament to both Bryn, and the wider technology team, and of course, to our long serving and very committed media managers and their broadcast teams.
Early February 2020, I picked up the phone to my media managers and said, “Get on to Amazon and buy up all the microphone headsets that you can”! I think they thought I had gone slightly crazy, and not withstanding the utter horror of what the world was about to face, we had the last laugh while many other businesses were scurrying around to acquire whatever headsets they could find, frequently at exorbitant prices.
We quickly got our broadcasters set up at home and within two weeks all were working remotely from our offices and studios, providing live and pre-recorded bulletins to our radio customers as if things were normal. Of course, things were far from that, and I remember being concerned if traffic would ever return to “normal”. Of course it did, well, a “new normal” I guess you would call it. However, when I head out onto the roads now, with the exception of the Monday morning and Friday afternoon rush hours (funny that), it appears that the new normal is remarkably similar to the er, old normal!
Technology continued to move at a pace with Microsoft’s introduction of Teams coming into its own once our broadcasters started working from home. From “checking in” to sharing incident information or picking up bulletins if a colleague’s system went down (or if there was somebody drilling the road outside), Teams became and indeed remains the backbone of our broadcast and incidents ops.
All of a sudden, it was 2025 and with technology not stopping, the “AI bulldozer” was moving closer and closer to radio broadcasting. Realising there is no stopping this thing, when we were approached by one of the largest UK radio groups to look at AI traffic & travel bulletins, we took up the challenge, embracing this rapidly developing technology. While naturally saddened by the inevitable impact on humans AI has, we created a first-class product with INRIX AI Traffic Reporter with some 650 AI bulletins going out on air every day now in the UK.
As I turn sixty soon, surely that’s a typo?, alas not, I look back on the more than 25 years with this business with so many fond memories and remain indebted to all of those -way too many to list here- who have (and do) go over and above, to keep all the plates spinning and the lights on at whatever time of day or night you wish to choose. It fills me with gratitude. But also, I look forward to (hopefully) the next 25 years and while I don’t anticipate all of those will be here at INRIX, I hope there will, at least be a few more as it’s been a real blast…