The Weather Channel makes for a pretty great streaming service - The Verge

The Weather Channel’s new $2.99 a month streaming service is basically just the cable channel streamed without a cable subscription — basically the opposite of CNN Plus. And that’s a good thing.

The Weather Channel is not trying to win you over by spending big on its version of House of Cards. It’s not bidding on The Office next time it comes up, nor is it interested in NFL games. “Our tentpole is Mother Nature,” says Nora Zimmett, TWC’s chief content officer. “And she’s always delivering weather.”

TWC launched a dedicated streaming service this month. It costs $2.99 a month or $29.99 a year, and it is... well, it’s The Weather Channel. The app’s main screen is an always-on stream that replicates exactly what you’d see on cable. That, Zimmett says, is what viewers were actually looking for. “We looked at our audience and heard, ‘where can I get The Weather Channel if I don’t want to pay $200 a month for a traditional bundle?’” she says. Rather than try to reinvent itself for streaming, TWC opted to just stream its channel.

This is a surprisingly novel idea in the streaming world by the way. Most networks have linear TV deals that specify when and where content is allowed to appear; that’s why most shows only stream after they air and some don’t stream at all. That causes a big problem for news, sports, and other particularly timely content. Who’s going to stream a “live news report” from last week or even last night? Meanwhile, those linear deals continue to be hugely lucrative for those networks, and most are not eager to dump cable (and its carriage fees) a minute before they have to. As a result, you get services like CNN Plus, which tried to build an entirely new lineup of live shows rather than simply streaming its existing ones. And we all know how that went.

“We are at a weird inflection point in our industry,” Zimmett says, “where we have one foot in cable and one foot in streaming. And I think all companies are still trying to figure out how to keep both sides happy – legally, financially, and everything else in between.” The Weather Channel’s bet, here, seems to be that it’s so essential to viewers that it can have it both ways. We’ll see how that pans out: The Weather Channel has had its fair share of fee disputes, and the new streaming service isn’t likely to make the carriers happy.

TWC has another weird corporate situation to deal with, too. The Weather Channel as you know it online and in mobile apps is owned by IBM and is an entirely separate entity from the TV network. As a result, you can’t stream TWC’s service on mobile or PCs — only TVs.(According to the FAQ page, it’s available on “Roku, Fire TV, Android TV, Samsung Smart TV, and Xfinity Flex,” with Vizio support planned in the future.) Which is a bummer.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/30/23144935/weather-channel-streaming-service-app-personalization

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