Arrow Classic Rock Starting January 1st 2001 the Dutch nationwide commercial radio station Arrow Classic Rock Radio switched over to use Traffic 2000 traffic & billing systems. Business Nieuws Radio Starting the summer of 2001, Business Nieuws Radio set up a full market research when they finally had decided that a new package might offer a better solution for their needs in traffic & billing. City FM CITY FM Radio Network solves Traffic & Billing challenge with Traffic 2000 Software. Hot Radio After a few disappointments in former package suppliers Hot Radio, the owners of the #1 radio network in eastern Holland, decided to choose Traffic 2000 for their traffic & billing system. Music of Your Life Music Of Your Life is "on-the-air" on more than 175 Radio Stations including Los Angeles / Riverside, Tampa / St. Pete, Dallas, Orlando, Syracuse and worldwide through the internet. It is enjoyed by more than 3,000,000 listeners every week! City FM CITY FM Radio Network solves Traffic & Billing challenge with Traffic 2000 Software CITY FM is a group of regional radio stations with licenses in the four biggest cities of Holland (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht). The format is Hot AC with a light rock accent. DJ's present live shows during morning and afternoon drive, with local and national news and traffic information. CITY FM sells advertising time on it's networked and local stations, and offers its advertisers the option to advertise on each individual station or any combination of stations. When our sales department was in search for a new system for Traffic & Billing, Station Director Alex Hollemans saw a chance for a more sophisticated approach in localising the format for the stations while fully synchronising the music for the different frequencies. The synchronisation challenge Radio stations that want to insert local advertising into their network programming are faced with different challenges. When spots are sold separately for each station, the length of a commercial break on each station can vary. European broadcasters are more affected by these differences in break times, because unlike the United States where spots are sold in fixed 30 or 60 second lengths, European broadcasters sell advertising time by the second. Synchronizing the regional frequencies has been an important demand for Hollemans in order to be able to service car listeners with an alternative frequency from their RDS signal while travelling from city to city. After implementation, all stations carry local promotions, local newsbreaks and local regional commercial breaks combined with a complete synchronized musical format. Music Flow is in Control Where the common solution for syndicated formats is a fixed length for commercial breaks, or fading the network signal in the last song. We found out that we preferred a non-standard approach. CITY FM should always have the natural music flow in control in stead of cutting of or fading out songs. Another demand was to keep the on-air commercial breaks to a minimum length without limiting the available time to sell. We wanted to assure that our stations would be able to run the lowest number of filler spots, based on the region that had sold the most seconds in a break. This way the station with the most seconds sold, would never have to schedule fillers but would set the length of the break length for all other stations. So Hollemans challenged the sales and traffic department with his needs. Sophisticated features Our solution was found in Traffic 2000 from Wedel Software. The company had some 10 years experience an this package offered the tools for our approach. The traffic system interfaces with the Dalet database to check for the actual technical length of the audio files for each of the commercials. Traffic 2000 then fills the shorter breaks to the length of the longest break. It includes a mini 'music scheduler' that can be used for promo's or other items. After Traffic 2000 synchronizes all local breaks to the same length, the logs are exported into the Dalet system. Other features that brought us quite some efficiency are the fully automated link to the national sales rep firm CRN. All national bookings are full automated added into the own traffic and billing system including all audio files. Further more there are features like stand-by bookings, combined scheduling and billing for all stations and a tremendous amount of reports for both sales and administrative management. "The efficiency after introducing Traffic 2000 brought us over 75% of savings in the workflow of our Traffic & Billing department", says Managing Director Robert van Haarlem.