The Weather Company

Broadcasters launching 24/7 streaming channels devoted to weather, or to news with weather updates, are finding their content strategies differ vastly from what they air in their linear newscasts. Here’s what the research and early experience are showing.

Broadcasters launching 24/7 streaming channels devoted to weather, or to news with weather updates, are finding their content strategies differ vastly from what they air in their linear newscasts. Here’s what the research and early experience are showing. Pictured: Ethan Dreilinger, client solutions engineer at The Weather Company, spoke with TVNewsCheck Publisher Kathy Haley about what broadcasters are learning from their weather OTT channels, during a fireside chat at TV2025: Monetizing the Future, a TVNewsCheck conference presented at NAB Show New York.

IBM said Tuesday it’s selling its weather unit, including its mobile app and websites, Weather.com, Weather Underground and Storm Radar. The buyer is Francisco Partners, a tech-focused private equity firm. The price was not disclosed. As part of the deal, IBM will retain access to the company’s weather data, which it uses to power some of the AI models it sells to enterprise clients.

LED systems and visualization engines are coming ever more into the range of even small broadcasters as the underlying technology and the workflows around them continuously improve. Pictured: This video wall, made to look like a big window, shows what is going on outside, and as the water rises, the window gets a crack and floods the studio. The crack, water and the sandbags are Max Reality elements. (Source: The Weather Company)

TV stations are signing up for a new weather radar service that is filling the gaps that exist in the national weather radars. One station meteorologist says “if you asked any meteorologist in any of those markets, they would say this is so helpful.”

Several years after the pandemic pushed a wide embrace of cloud editing, the technology has made significant strides in speed and automation. Above, Avid’s Edit on Demand is a cloud-based premium editing and post-production solution that can be deployed and scaled on demand.

Changing consumer expectations and a steady rise in the number of severe weather events are raising the stakes for already busy meteorology teams, who must send alerts to their audiences over a growing number of devices and platforms. Automation, the cloud and easy access to familiar graphics are simplifying workflows.

A rise in the number of extreme weather events has increased demand for weather alerting by local TV meteorologists, who must communicate with their audiences over the air, online, on mobile, social and OTT. TVNewsCheck and The Weather Company will talk about how technology is meeting the demand for faster, easier and more compelling weather alerting during an Oct. 27 webinar. Register here.

Rising numbers of severe weather events have bumped up consumer demand for news and information. Technology is responding with new solutions that make weather and climate storytelling easier than ever, while boosting the ability of teams to collaborate locally or across a station group. Moving weather workflows to the cloud opens up new opportunities for collaboration among stations in a group, while new solutions like Max Velocity and Max Alert Live make it easy to quickly produce richer content. Dive deep while watching a webinar on all this here. 

Climate change and a fragmenting media ecosystem have combined to put new pressure on weather storytellers and the businesses capitalizing on their work. To address how technology is stepping up to address these challenges, TVNewsCheck and The Weather Company will host a conversation about freeing up traditional workflows while enhancing security and enabling cost-effective disaster recovery. Speakers, counter-clockwise from upper left: The Weather Company’s Jim Politis, product manager, Max Velocity; Pat Feldhausen, product manager, Max Alerting; Bob Millis, product manager, Max Cloud. TVNewsCheck co-founder and publisher Kathy Haley, (upper right) will moderate. Register here.

Broadcasters racing to keep up with creating content for an expanding array of distribution platforms told The Weather Company their meteorologists needed two things: speed to publish and the ability to work remotely. The weather provider responded with Max Velocity, a browser based platform that enables lightning fast story creation in a tool so easy to use that it expands the potential user pool to non-meteorologists and even sponsors.

As the business of broadcasting continues to add platforms, pressure grows to produce more content more efficiently. The Weather Company, an IBM business, has responded with a major technology announcement, set for Oct 12. TVNewsCheck and The Weather Company will follow up this announcement on Oct. 28 with an in-depth conversation about what the future of digital weather storytelling will look like. Join us.

New jobs posted to TVNewsCheck’s Media Job Center include openings for a chief engineer, a sales executive and a sales account executive.

Broadcasters aiming to diversify digital revenue streams in the wake of disruption in the programmatic advertising universe may consider partnering with The Weather Company, an IBM Business, and offering a premium version of their mobile weather app. The Max Mobile Premium app, pictured here, uses AI-powered messaging to invite Max Mobile users to upgrade. 

Byron Allen, founder, chairman and CEO of Allen Media Group and The Weather Group, will continue his crusade to win equity and inclusion for Black-owned media in the world of advertising by headlining  the first Black-Owned Media Upfront. The event, set for May 11 and 12 from noon to 2:30 p.m. ET, will turn a spotlight on the programming and audiences of his companies and others involved in the movement. Register here to participate.

Station groups can capitalize on shifts in the mobile advertising landscape by building in a subscription revenue stream, according to executives from The Weather Company, who will appear on a TVNewsCheck webinar on April 27 at 3 p.m. ET. The event will examine how the Max Mobile white label app that many broadcasters offer their followers can use artificial intelligence to invite, at just the right time based on user behavior, an upgrade to premium. Join us by registering here.

Meteorologists will soon be able to quickly and easily share their best work with colleagues at other stations in their group, thanks to a new solution, Max Cloud, from The Weather Company, an IBM Business. Company executives mapped out their journey to the cloud during a TVNewsCheck webinar.

Univision Network Chief Meteorologist Albert Martinez will join HellerWeather’s Tim Heller and The Weather Company’s Mike Convey for a TVNewsCheck webinar focused on elevating local TV weather segments to more effectively compete with digital platforms. Key to their strategy: storytelling with augmented reality. Register here.

Local TV, considered one of the most trustworthy sources of news by consumers navigating challenging times, could cement relationships with newer and younger viewers by capitalizing on their ability to deliver superior weather content on TV, social, mobile, OTT and the web.

Designed to respond to breaking weather alerts, the “One Click Play-to-Air” interface is designed to accelerate broadcast production workflows and give broadcasters access to improved on-air tools and resources for expedited weather data analysis and presentation.

While consumers with GPS-enabled smartphones expect real-time weather reports down to the street-corner level, station meteorologists say it’s not that simple. Most of what one gets from apps is just model data that hasn’t been subject to human interpretation. Sifting through the various models and presenting a forecast that incorporates local knowledge is where station meteorologists excel. “The local knowledge that experienced meteorologists can lend to the product is invaluable,” says Justin Keifer,  chief meteorologist at WMBB Panama City, Fla.