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Home | Broadcasting Network | The Local AccuWeather Channel
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The service provides weather-related content to television affiliates for broadcast on cable, digital subchannels, and digital cable by certain broadcast television affiliates in the United States. Some stations also offer the channel via live streaming video on their websites. The channel has similarities and differences to its main competitor, The Weather Channel, and counterpart digital service Weatherscan. The AccuWeather programming lineup provides national and regional video forecasts. In addition, there are AccuWeather travel, sports, and lifestyle segments. Most local affiliates add their own local weather updates and some even include local news and traffic updates. Each segment's length, including advertisements and local segments, is denoted by a playback bar along the bottom portion of the video portion, allowing a viewer to always know how long before their segment of interest will air. Unlike The Weather Channel, The Local AccuWeather Channel has an L-bar format (which is implemented on Weatherscan and is extremely similar to the former NBC Weather Plus L-bar) so that, even when the video window is playing content such as a national forecast, local information is always available around the periphery of the screen. A station can either utilize the default setup of having segment names scroll below the video window, or display a scrolling news ticker of headlines, traffic or weather information. The data area's background image is also changed every hour in order to prevent LCD burn-in. The channel goes into a special mode when severe weather occurs, like Weatherscan. Several affiliates also break from the Local AccuWeather content when breaking news occurs and the station wants to utilize the subchannel for either extended news and weather coverage, or to push main channel programming to the subchannel. Weatherscan, however, does not feature any on-camera meteorologists, as its content is generated completely by weather computer at the cable headend. The major difference between The Weather Channel and AccuWeather is that all national and regional weather forecast segments are not broadcast live on AccuWeather but are on The Weather Channel; AccuWeather pretapes all of its weather forecasts every few hours, which poses a problem during severe weather events when current warnings are not able to be carried out by AccuWeather's on-camera meteorologists (The Weather Channel has always had its meteorologists disseminate current severe weather warnings on-air during severe weather events due to its live forecast format). Unlike NBC Weather Plus, the broadcast television affiliates with The Local AccuWeather Channel are not affiliated with one single network. Many of the stations are affiliated with the CBS, Fox, and especially the ABC networks. For the most part, the local stations do not label the AccuWeather service as a so-called "Local AccuWeather Channel". Instead, the local stations choose to have their own names such as "Weather Now". Also, there is no separate logo for the channel. In most places, the channel carries the station brand and either the AccuWeather.com brand or a statement such as "powered by AccuWeather.com". Local affiliates can add content to the Local AccuWeather content that is either weather or other; the most prominent example is in the KNXV-TV GoAZ.tv implementation, which relies less on the weather content and more on traffic maps and text cards featuring road closure information. Before the December 2008 discontinuation of NBC Weather Plus, seven NBC-affiliated stations chose to use Local AccuWeather instead: KNVN, KOBI, KOTI are all locally owned; KULR owned by Max Media; and WJHG, WILX and WMTV are owned by Gray Television. Since December 2008 as either the NBC stations chose to discontinue using the Weather Plus system for local use or the systems became outmoded, several other NBC stations have begun to switch over to Local AccuWeather instead of picking up NBC's suggested replacement for Weather Plus, Universal Sports. In one rare case, both the ABC and NBC affiliates in Phoenix carry the network, although the ABC station has chosen more of a focus on traffic conditions (as noted in the paragraph above) for their version of the subchannel. In September 2010, AccuWeather began to provide the channel's data components to their first non-commercial television client, for Milwaukee's PBS member organization Milwaukee Public Television's WMVS. WTMJ-TV already carries Local AccuWeather in that market, but WMVS's digital AccuWeather subchannel is purposefully structured to meet non-commercial guidelines and focuses more on local mapping, while not making any mention of AccuWeather to speak of or airing LAWC content, substituting NOAA Weather Radio audio from local station KEC60 instead. Not all of the stations air the digital channel's complete daily transmission; a few AccuWeather affiliates also air a limited amount of syndicated programming, and may even air regularly scheduled network programming (usually sports) when the main channel cannot. All of the subchannels must also have the required three hours per week of E/I-compliant programming scheduled locally by the station, as AccuWeather does not produce E/I-compliant programming for their affiliates, unlike NBC Weather Plus, which provided Weather Plus U on their national feed for all of their affiliates. |
