Weather to Stream
Climatic video makes move onto the Web
By Karen Brown
from the June 4, 2001 issue of Broadband Week
Joe Slugger is an ardent baseball fan, but he is not fond of getting soaked by a thunderstorm halfway through the seventh inning. So before he heads to the ballpark, he goes online to check the weather--and just like TV, he sees a video of a weathercaster telling him there is a chance for rain. Into his game bag goes the trusted umbrella.
Weather video such as this has found some footing on the Internet, but individual Web site strategies are as variable as, well, the weather. While some sites are seeing high pressure to move into rich media weather content, others are cooler on the prospect.
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Wireless Weather Video a Stalled Front
Like the storm fronts it tracks, streaming media weather content may one day be on the move via wireless handheld devices. If, that is, broadband third generation mobile wireless technology ever arrives in the United States.
Banking on the idea that 3G networks will take off, AccuWeather recently forged a contract with two chip manufacturers to integrate streaming video capabilities into PDAs and digital cellular phones. These companies in turn will be working with the major telcos to include the technology into their next-generation wireless networks.
"This technology would mean nothing if they didn't have the content, and they find that weather is going to be one of the most if not the most popular content available for these handheld devices," says Jay Mathieu, AccuWeather's streaming media product manager.
While AccuWeather is starting to explore these wireless applications, AccuWeather president Joel Myers does note it will be a while before a significant number of users tap the site from a handheld device.
"Certainly the wireless developments are exciting and there is no question there is going to be a lot of breakthroughs there and there is going to be a trend toward more wireless in the United States," he says. "But that all said, we still expect over the next couple of years more volume of usage on the traditional PC than wireless in the United States."
Indeed, there are others sounding cautionary notes about wireless streaming media and weather. Tom Flournoy, director of wireless business development at the Weather Channel's weather.com Web site, says his company's focus is going to stay on text-based delivery.
"The environment could be richer, more graphical, with easier navigation--but fundamentally we are able to produce and display what people will really want to have on the go," Flournoy. When it comes to streaming video, "some of those things could be interesting, but I don't know if people are going to want to see ... I don't know what the consumer demand will be for that. So we are kind of taking a wait-and-see on this streaming wireless content."
-- K.B.
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One of the more enthusiastic backers of streaming media in weather content is AccuWeather, a weather service that has provided forecasting for years to traditional broadcast media and now has an online product at accuweather.com. The site's Streaming Video Weather service offers a daily stock of 150 streaming video clips updated as much as every 30 minutes for breaking news. The site processes about 400 to 500 streaming video clips per day, covering 101 U.S. city forecasts, breaking weather, regional reports and 15 international city forecasts.
Distributed on accuweather.com and the Yahoo! Broadcast video content portal, the video weather content draws about 20,000 hits a day--"but that spikes up by a factor of five to 10 on busy weather days," according to AccuWeather founder and president Joel Myers.
"If you are traveling to San Francisco or New York or whatever, what you can do is get on and get the five-day forecast with a talking head presenting it ... just like you would see the weather in those cities," he says.
That ample video content is produced by an army of 400 Web production employees, including 15 Webcast meteorologists. Those numbers reflect AccuWeather's bet that the Internet is becoming a key outlet for its video programming, and the initial numbers seem to support that. Myers says the site's December page views totaled 41 million, compared to 10 million recorded in December 1999.
"So we are experiencing exponential growth on accuweather.com, and clearly with the move to broadband and the exponential increase in broadband capacity and the convergence of the media, we see that as the future," he says. "We have that capability here because we have TV studios in-house and it was easy to convert those over and use them for streaming."
The outlook for more streaming media at AccuWeather looks fair, with much of the site's 10,000 associated Web pages compatible for more streaming media content.
"As broadband accelerates and it becomes easier and easier there's no question in my mind that it is going to increase and represent an increasing percentage of usage," Myers says.
But other weather players are not as certain about the streaming media front. Weather.com, for example, is taking a more cautious approach, having just added broadband video to its site in February. Eventually, all video on the site will be offered with a broadband connection option, but for now it is limited to daily features such as Weekly Planner, Weekend Outlook, Storm Watch, and Weather in Motion.
"That's really our foray into broadband--it is going to be through streaming video," says Tony Grohovsky, Weather.com's director of broadband services.
Weather.com's slower adoption of video stems from a cost and content point of view. While Grohovsky says the amount of broadband video content likely will increase on the site, it will happen only where justified.
"We'll probably grow--I would say cautiously, because there is an expense along with streaming video," he notes. "We would want to make sure, one, that we are getting the traffic and users find it worthwhile, and second--and probably most importantly--that we can monetize that to hopefully more than cover our cost through advertising."
Being married to a video asset-rich cable channel doesn't provide as much help as you would think, either. The site does use Weather Channel feature programs, but hourly weather updates are too perishable for weather.com to convert. So a fair amount of the content is original programming, such as a segment on homeowner weatherizing tips from building expert Danny Lipford.
"Weather information, once it's gone, it's really not something you can go back and look at again ... it's not like sports highlights," Grohovsky says. "So you kind of have the more evergreen content, and then you have the daily content."
In the future, Grohovsky would like to introduce the Weather Channel travel program "Atmospheres" in some form on the site. "I don't know that we will ever stream a whole hour's worth of content, but we may break it up--for example some travel-related segments that we would put in the travel pages."
At this point, Weather.com's streaming video strategy still is evolving. For example, subscription content may be an option, but Grohovsky says that still requires more study. The central issue is in convincing users to pay for Weather.com content, and "I don't know that our content is really that compelling," he says.
Weather.com also is trying to target how moving pictures attract Web users.
"We do pretty good as far as our streaming numbers, but compared to our overall site traffic it is miniscule, just because our site garners a lot of traffic," he says. "So I am always looking to increase that, and is it a matter of trying to figure out, 'Is it the content or is it the availability of the content?'"
"We are definitely sold on streaming video and broadband," he adds. It is all about "just how does it fit on our site? How to best use it rather than just throw a bunch of video out there and see what works."
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