Stations Expanding Weather To Web, Mobile

A couple of years ago, the companies providing weather data and graphics to television stations had a three-screen strategy: broadcast, the Web and mobile. Now, it’s six screens and counting.

Those six may include the main broadcast channel, a pair of digital subchannels, the Web, mobile platforms and social media. “The term ‘third screen’ is now almost obsolete,” said Lee Rainey, VP of marketing at AccuWeather. “The world is not so simple anymore.”

Indeed it’s not. Broadcasters, in tight economic times, know that with less income they must expand to new media platforms. Weather programming is the single largest audience driver for many stations, and audiences now want weather forecasts on demand, on any device, wherever they may be.

“The challenge for broadcasters is to reach their audience throughout the day—regardless of whether they are in front of a television set and regardless of whether they even watch video on traditional television anymore,” said Rainey.

Companies like AccuWeather, Weather Services International (WSI), Weather Central, Baron Services, Weather Decision Technologies, Custom Weather and Orad are among many that offer either complete or partial weather programming to television stations.

Some provide just the data, while others supply everything from computing and display equipment to graphics, consulting and even pre-produced weather programming.

Some stations use multiple weather service providers, and some providers sell wholesale data to their competitors. Indeed, a look at weather vendors is a tangled web of relationships.

All of the weather companies agree on one thing. New media technologies, mainly development of applications for mobile smartphones and tablets, and social media, are driving their current research and development.

The use of social media applications is also coming on fast. AccuWeather, which has about 200 TV station clients, already has 90,000 followers on its Facebook page. It helps its client stations set up their own weather pages on the social media service. Its CinemaLive can be used to create video for clients’ Facebook pages.

AccuWeather also provides Twitter accounts, one targeted to reporters for station clients that want to be alerted for breaking news. When the public found out about the Twitter feed, it exploded to 9,000 followers—a phenomenon that even surprised AccuWeather.

But it’s Apple’s iPhone and iPad that are driving the most change, all the weather companies say.

“Our broadcast clients want weather access on the iPad and the very latest mobile devices. It has become a kind of ‘click and go’ channel,” said Mark Taylor, SVP of business development at Weather Decision Technologies (WDT). “The general trajectory of the market is moving toward mobile. This is a real game-changer for broadcasters. People are not into appointment viewing of weather anymore. The broadcasters have to tap into this in a smart way or risk becoming irrelevant to a new generation.”

That means not only developing station-branded applications for Apple’s iPhones and iPad and most other mobile phones, but also creating just the right amount of relevant data for each screen. For example, Taylor said, his company learned in focus groups that 90% of Americans can’t read maps anymore, making much of earlier weather data on mobile devices more or less useless.

This knowledge has led to new display options, like interactive mapping and allowing broadcast clients to associate weather data with their own content — including user-provided video, blogs and social media. “The whole weather ecosystem has exploded with Facebook, Web cameras and smartphones,” he said.

WDT’s iMapLive, iMapInteractive and iMapMobile extends interactive screens to all three platforms. The information lives in a cloud and is accessible in real time. In a demo at CNN, Aaron Brodie, a CNN producer, visually tracked on an interactive U.S. map the vehicles of all of the Discovery Channel’s Storm Chasers. When he clicked on one, a live shot came up of Reed Timmer, a storm chaser in an actual storm, who gave a live interview from his moving vehicle.

Geoff Flint, president-CEO of CustomWeather, is devoting significant resources to mobile applications. His company has more than 200 clients, including CGS Infographics Automation, whose clients include WMAQ Chicago and KOMO Seattle; Orad; and DST, MultiChoice’s digital satellite provider in Africa.

CustomWeather, Flint said, was the first company to create weather overlays for Google and Bing maps, allowing mobile users to zoom-in on the weather report as they zoom-in on a map. “We can generate a zoom-in street level weather shot that’s accurate in real time,” he said.

All CustomWeather’s products have also been geo-coded with GPS information. “Now you can pull up the weather anywhere in the world for an exact set of coordinates,” he said. “A lot of people now want weather for a specific location even though there is no weather station nearby.”

Perhaps most difficult is filtering mobile queries so as not to provide too much information. “We have created queries so our clients can pull specific information from our various products into a single screen. This not only saves bandwidth, but it creates more useful information by not overloading the small screen.”

Another popular service increasingly used by broadcasters is customized SMS messaging. A message is requested and sent to a viewer when a certain set of weather criteria occurs. “This is another service that builds relevance to a broadcaster’s brand,” Flint said.

Orad, a CustomWeather client, introduced its WorldMapper visualization tool at IBC last week. It’s based on CustomWeather’s platform and works with Microsoft’s Bing map system. The company also introduced on-camera iPad control so talent can run its studio graphics system.

Shaun Dail, Orad’s VP of sales and marketing for North America, said the company expects to introduce a complete new platform by next year’s NAB Show that incorporates support for all mobile and Web technologies.

One of the largest weather service providers is WSI, a sister company to the Weather Channel. It provides weather services to about 400 television stations and has 32 white-labeled TV stations apps running on Apple’s iPhone. Many more are in development or waiting for approval by Apple.

Jim Menard, VP-GM of cross-platform technologies and international at WSI, said his company’s Prism product has enabled stations to create Web services for several years. What’s new, he said, is Max One, part of the company’s TruVu Max technology. It allows a TV presenter to quickly produce programming for the Web or mobile from a desktop rather than a TV studio. “The presenter uses a webcam … and can easily cut a show,” Menard said.

Also new are modules called Weather Active Maps and Weather Active Mobile. The maps module allows the production of interactive maps mixing visual elements, while the mobile module allows the same on phones like the iPhone and Android phones. Coming later this year will be connections to social media platforms.

“We are doing entirely branded weather apps for television stations using the most advanced technology available,” Menard said. “People want data right away and this allows them to get it without digging through menus. When a user hits that ‘weather’ button on his smartphone, the television station is establishing value to that user.”

That’s exactly what motivated Jeff Woodard, news director of WGRZ Buffalo, to purchase WSI’s apps for iPhone and iPad. The apps went online in mid-June, so Woodard said there’s been little time to truly measure their impact.

“We promote the apps heavily in all our newscasts,” Woodard said. “The WSI app is hard to discern because it’s a separate entity with our branding on it. We incorporate it in our overall on-air and online coverage. Having the apps definitely enhances our weather image in the marketplace. It shows us being innovative and out front with our weather coverage.”

Perhaps most significant, said Woodard, is the station’s market-exclusive interactive Doppler radar feature, which spans to on-air, the website and the mobile devices. “It’s a big hit on the Web. Our weather coverage is always high, but on a bad weather day the numbers spike through the roof. On those days, we put interactive Doppler front and center on our website, and that extends to iPhone and iPad.”

At Withers’ WDTV Clarksburg, W.Va, the general manager, Tim DeFazio, recently supervised the purchase and installation of AccuWeather’s CinemaLive HD weather display as well as its SelectWarn Severe Weather Command Center. CinemaLive combines the three screens into a single system, allowing broadcast, Web and mobile feeds.

“We have had an active website which doubles in users each year,” said DeFazio. “However, mobile is new. I absolutely feel it’s important to extend our brand into the new media. It can get expensive, but we are keeping a handle on costs.”

DeFazio was bluntly honest, though, in trying to predict the result of his station’s experiment. “I think we are flying blind here,” he said. “Are we expecting to make a lot of money out of this?  No. But I think we will pick up some revenue. But for me to tell you how much, I’d be lying to you if I said I knew.”

The primary group being targeted, DeFazio said, are people between 12 and 24. However, he’s doubtful whether that group will ever really watch the station’s news programming. He’s far more interested is a secondary group, people 42-48. But, even then, he’s not really sure.

“We will benefit because AccuWeather is doing most of the work,” he added. “It’s our brand, but their product. I think it’s important for a station to have a good partnership with a vendor, which we do.”

Broadcast weather programming — and TV stations themselves — are going through a period of huge change. “Six months is a long, long time in the mobile and the Web worlds. Things change radically,” said WSI’s Menard. “The main thing a local station must do is leverage their assets in the mobile and Web worlds. That is their No. 1 priority.

“In three to five years, how people get the content will be immaterial,” he added. “People will know they can get weather data from any number of devices at any time. It will be the brand they care about. They will trust a brand and know it will be there. Broadcasters must build their weather brand for the future.”