Pennsylvania Highways Blog

I’ve always had an interest in broadcasting from building a small AM radio station with a Radio Shack 130-in-one Project Kit to when I entered college and got a degree in Communication.

With the advent of digital television and the world of multicasting opening to broadcasters, many are utilizing their new bandwidth for other programming in addition to the main channel. PBS affiliates are broadcasting other PBS-branded channels such as Create and other affiliates have created local channels such as WQED's Neighborhood Channel which airs a lot of Rick Sebak's Pittsburgh documentaries. NBC affiliates are co-branding the NBC Weather Plus for their local markets.

WTAE-4 launched their Weather & Traffic Watch 4 channel in the Spring utilizing AccuWeather content. Since I have an interest in roads as well as weather, it piqued my interest. It isn’t really anything too groundbreaking as the Traffic.com information is in a crawl at the bottom of the video portion of the screen and sometimes they will show video from PennDOT's traffic cameras.



However, this made WPXI-11 kick it up a notch to where they are now providing traffic information during the local inserts on their Weather Plus channel. The difference is that they use Traffic.com’s flow maps to illustrate traffic conditions instead of a continual crawl.



Even The Weather Channel provides traffic information during the "Local on the 8's" segment, but only available to cable subscribers. The new IntelliStar systems installed at the headends will feed the information during the local segments on the main Weather Channel and around the clock on their Weatherscan channel.



The idea isn’t new as San Antonio, Texas has had a low-power TV station owned by TxDOT broadcasting traffic cameras since 1996.