This past week Dish Network announced it would be dropping The Weather Channel and creating a new weather channel called “The Weather Cast.” The primary reason they cited was rights fees– which were going up about 9%. The other reason was that ever since NBC took over the channel two years ago (and, to be fair, before that), it’s been moving the channel, slowly but surely, away from weather. There’s a morning talk show hosted by Al Roker that looks and feels like an extension of the already 4-hour-long Today Show on NBC. There’s the docudrama “Storm Stories” and the hysteria-driven “It Could Happen Tomorrow,” both of which predated the NBC takeover. Most egregious, however, is their decision to put movies on every Friday night, many of which have virtually nothing to do with weather, while severe storms are brewing across the country (it’s tornado season, and 7:00 in the evening is when most tornadoes hit). So, Dish’s channel aimed to go weather, 24/7, and dump TWC. By dumping TWC they would have saved approximately $20,000,000 per year– 12 cents per subscriber per month, 12 months a year, 14,000,000 subscribers.
That is, until four days later (i.e., today)– when they reached an agreement. The all-weather channel is gone, replaced by a TWC-owned automation channel. TWC still has a movie about gorillas scheduled for Friday night. The Weather Channel is not particularly well-liked among meteorologists (including myself) or weatherphiles, and is only popular in large part due to brand recognition and monopoly. A competitor would likely have done almost as well financially, if not better, especially as an in-house production with millions of subscribers. This just doesn’t make any business sense to me.
I have their weather app on my iPhone – it shows the forecast along with a regional video forecast. If I didn’t have that, there is weather.gov. Do you think Internet competition is a factor?