Weatherscan

~ the eulogy ~

On 12 December 2022 an IntelliStar unit sitting in a Suddenlink headend in Beckley, West Virginia was switched off, and that was the end of a television network that had been on the air for 24 years. There was no final broadcast to watch. The channel had never had anybody on it to say goodbye.

Weatherscan started on 28 July 1998 as a national feed and went local on 31 March 1999. The idea was to take The Weather Channel's "Local on the 8s" segment, the part viewers actually waited through the national programming for, and run only that, forever. Current conditions and the seven-day, plus radar and a few specialty packages for boaters or gardeners, on a loop with no beginning.

The clever part was architectural. Nothing came down from Atlanta except data. A WeatherStar XL and later an IntelliStar unit was installed at each cable operator's headend, and that box rendered the graphics for its own region locally, which is why Weatherscan in Ohio showed Ohio and the network had no master control in any meaningful sense. Every market ran its own copy of the channel.

~ the dossier ~

~ the machine on the loop ~

What people remember is the music. Hours of light jazz and smooth instrumentals under slowly wiping maps and tables of numbers, the whole thing paced for a waiting room. It was television with the presenter removed and the furniture left in place, and it accidentally produced one of the most distinctive moods American cable ever had.

None of this reached me. Turkish cable had no automated weather channel, and the closest equivalent in my house was a teletext page you called up by number and read while it sat there, which is the same information with none of the atmosphere. Weatherscan's cult is almost entirely American, and it is a real cult: there is an archive wiki documenting every hardware generation, and fans have built software simulators that recreate the loop well enough that one of them now ranks above the dead channel on a search for its name.

~ the unraveling ~

It peaked at 22 million subscribers in February 2005, carried by Comcast and Cox among others. From 2015 the operators started dropping it, and Comcast finished pulling it by December 2017. The reason was in everyone's pocket: a channel that tells you the local forecast cannot compete with an app that tells you the forecast where you are standing.

The hardware made it worse. Weatherscan never went HD, because the equipment design dated to the early 2000s and nobody was going to re-engineer a headend box for a declining service. By 2020 it was a standard-definition channel in a high-definition lineup, which is the kind of detail that gets a slot reassigned.

~ the day it died ~

Weather Group Television announced on 12 September 2022 that the service would end on or before 9 December. A unit still running in Beckley on 10 December was displaying its own shutdown notice with a date of 12 December, so the network outlived its announced death by three days and then stopped. Allen Media Group owned it by then, having bought The Weather Channel's television assets in 2018.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »