Is The Weather Channel REALLY A Prized Asset?

Implications: Even if you're one of the less than 3% of people that does not get TWC (The Weather Channel) on one of the average household's multiple TV sets blaring away at any hour of the day or night, TWC is the favored channel at airport screens and even in bars.  And of course the TWC is in many other languages too.  So if you have never seen TWC, you literally have been holed-up in some cave.  TWC is almost as ubiquitous as McDonald’s!  Everybody is talking about TWC.  Everybody wants to own it, now that it is up for sale.  So, surely, TWC is a top dog prize, right?  I might shock you, but I would not be doing my job if I agreed with the majority of TWC fanatics.  

Analysis: If there is one subject that unites many across all ages, backgrounds, and other differences, it is the weather.  The Weather Channel was a cable network that succeeded when almost all the experts predicted it would fail.  But fail it did not.  I well remember the first few years of TWC:  gosh, it not only was amazing to us meteorologists, especially compared to the competition – the news channels’ 2-minute segments of the next 3-days’ highs and lows; but also, it was amazing to any person who loved the weather. 

 

Back then, in the first five years of its service, TWC gave the weather details for at least 90% of every hour, and higher than that during peak times and widespread inclement weather episodes.  Meteorologists on TWC would go out on a limb, providing different forecasts to NWS (the National Weather Service) and NHC (the National Hurricane Center) and were talkative “real” people getting important information across to the public and whoever wanted to also be fascinated with the weather. 

 

Now, TWC has sadly become a huge advertising program and round-the-clock center for drugs.  Let me clarify that:  pharmaceutical pills.  Check me and time it to work out the math:   on an average daytime hour, TWC advertising takes out 58% of each hour, and it goes up to 70% at night.  In fact, at times, the back-to-back commercials for diarrhea, insomnia, back pain and irritable bowel syndrome become so irritating themselves, that it is possible in an increasingly sensitive crowd that TWC itself directly causes some of the body irregularities for which ironically its commercials provide patch-the-wound medications.  In addition, since some of my friends have been on-air meteorologists at TWC, it is my opinion that they will agree that those on-camera personalities who have survived the rather tumultuous management switchbacks over the past few years, and don’t mind being told what to say more than half the time, have in effect become talking weather parrots, programmed not to veer-off the hundred-page-plus training manual.

 

In addition, more and more people are getting their weather information not only from the Internet, but better weather info sites too, and without all the annoying commercials.  Rather astute individuals have taken weather information from TWC, Accuweather, Weather Underground, and other weather internet sources that update their forecasts round-the-clock, and have published the results of forecast contests in blogs and on various sites.  TWC comes regularly in the bottom one-third in accuracy.  With climate change on the increase, with more and more impacts and effects on industry and people’s livelihood, THE KEY in weather forecasting is accuracy.

 

Unfortunately, TWC just does not ‘get it’.  As a meteorologist for twenty years (and former on-air weatherman), I make predictions; 85-90% of the time, I am right.  The other times, I will readily admit I just don’t get close; long-term though, I will beat Mother Nature with successful results, and that is why it ought to be, especially with today’s technology.  But TWC goes around copying everyone and then calling themselves the “Authority”.  People are waking-up, or have already woken-up and switched TWC off.  I can say with pretty good confidence, although it may sound contrary to some numbers and charts you may see, viewers are disappearing from TWC like bees from a poisoned hive.

 

But when I make the following prediction, maybe this is one of those few times when I am just ‘up in the clouds’:  TWC has seen its peak time, its best days are behind us, the clouds are now darkening, and TWC – if it does not see the light – will become dizzy from downdrafts and twisted from tornadoes.

 

In summarizing a cloud or two at TWC, the old days of darn good weather forecasting are over, unless of course, management wake-up with a few cold buckets of water thrown over their heads, and look back on the old-day videos, and realize that the millions they make from drug companies is one way to do it, but certainly not a healthy way aligned to its original tune, and certainly not a way for TWC to see many sunny days in the future.