The Weather Channel and weather.com are about to be sold. Word is Landmark Communications, the current owner, will sell The Weather Channel to NBC for $3.5 billion.
Does The Weather Channel look like $3.5 billion to you? Me neither.
They’ve always been a moderate payer, taking and losing their talent mostly to the smaller end of medium size markets. Considering what they earn (based on what they asking), they could have aimed higher.
It’s actually a great idea for NBC and will almost certainly lead to ‘central casting’ of local weathercasts at some time. Good for NBC, but bad for guys like Geoff, because our market will be reduced as meteorologist begin servicing multiple outlets. In many ways, this is like bulls servicing cows.
You can prepare and broadcast a weathercast from anywhere, but something will be lost. There are a few times every season when my experience points me away from computer guidance. It’s not very often, but a guy in Idaho working with just guidance would miss it..
Guess this will mean the either the end or a huge proliferation of “Weather Plus” digital channels. At first I was just going to say the end, but then I started to wonder if that is exactly the opposite, and that NBC will throw the Weather Channel on all of its affilliates as an extra digital channel. Maybe its just the end of highly localized Wether Plus like channel 30 has.
Central casting weather did not work…. Sinclair tried that as part of their failed NewsCentral product. It was good fun, though, to see the people in Baltimore try to pronounce cities in Wisconsin such as Oconomowoc, Mukwonago, Waukesha, and Wauwatosa.
Frankly, I think the Weather Channel has been a joke for a long time. Ever since they stopped using the NWS forecasts and have let their computers do the forecasting, I’ve found them to be less-than-accurate. Of course, I’m also the type who would rather support my local meteorologists than the Weather Channel. (And besides, I don’t have cable, so I can’t watch TWC anyway!)
-Adam
I could care less about the weather channel ,but if they make any changes, they need to get rid of those documentaries like “Storm Stories” that are just as frequent and just as annoying as the prison documentaries on msnbc.
While I’m complaining, I’ll also shine a light on a nauseating feature “The Climate Code with Dr. Heidi Cullen”, which basically pushes every global warming scare scenario she can find into a “documentary” series.
I’m convinced that 99% of people who tune into a weather channel want to see current conditions and forecasts, not that crap.
I don’t see how this directly threatens the local forecasters, I think most folks would rather see what the locals have to say, not what someone in Atlanta has to say about somewhere 1000 miles away.
Last week I was in London, and tuned in to the BBC late at night just in time to catch two of their news anchors bemusedly discussing this very topic, in a “silly Americans, actually wasting television bandwidth on a 24-hour weather channel” way. I thought it was pretty funny.
I am an admitted TWC junkie, but I do take their forecasts with a pound of salt and I stay as far away from their “reality shows” as possible. I tune in to watch the weather, dammit!!
Value of real estate property in Atlanta (which is owned) + present value of expected cash flow… seems like about a half-billion premium by my count. Attribute that to synergies for NBC-Universal. (Also to stability from cable fee cash flow, balancing ad revenue variations.)
It sounds a bit high, but not ridiculous for a station that is de facto a national “must-carry.”
The late John Hope was the only forecaster that I viewed as a “must-watch.” Besides you on the “Ocho”, of course.