Bloomberg reports that ratings are down 20% over three years, and with the sort of programming they continue with, such as this lame “forecast from 2050” with Sam Champion and go-to storm chaser guy Jim Cantore, where in a CGI based forecast, he laments rising sea levels while standing in fake water.
Here is the fake forecast video, sponsored by the World Meteorological Organization (part of the U.N.):
It doesn’t look like their ratings and viewers will rebound any time soon, much like global warming itself, which is now in an extended pause that may last as long as 30 years.
Bloomberg reports:
DirecTV dropped the Weather Channel for about three months earlier this year after failing to come to an agreement about how much the network should be paid in affiliate fees. The Weather Channel agreed to cut back on its reality programming to include more local weather updates when DirecTV agreed to a new deal in April.
…
DirecTV, with 20 million subscribers, had pushed for a reduction of more than 20 percent in the fees it pays the Weather Channel, which had asked for an increase of 1 cent a month per subscriber.
The Weather Channel, based in Atlanta, averaged 13 cents a month per subscriber in 2013 and in 2012, according to estimates from researcher SNL Kagan. It averaged 214,000 daily viewers in 2013, down from 264,000 in 2011, according to data provided by Nielsen.
Maybe “Fat guys in the Woods” (yes that is really a TWC show) will save them:
Bloomberg also mentions that “the companies that own The Weather Channel—including Bain Capital, Blackstone, and NBC Universal—appear to be in the beginning stages of talks to sell the Atlanta-based weather behemoth”.
The billion dollar question is: who would buy it? NBCUniversal bought TWC in 2008 for about $3.5 billion. They’d be lucky to get half of that today in a sale, and any potential buyer would be even luckier to see any profit from it after the sale. Maybe Al Jazerra?
I stopped watching TWC years ago – everything I need to know about the weather is online without the whole layer of political & social commentary that their obsession with CAGW brings. Not surprised at all that their ratings are dropping as most weather junkies I know are also skeptics …. I guess they are just trying to appeal to those without any knowledge base or analytical skills
Never underestimate the intelligence of your audience.
A quite subtle shift seems to be underway in amongst the climate skeptic blogs and commenters.
A year or so ago the climate alarmist propaganda appeared to be overwhelming and so utterly pervasive that the climate warming / climate change skeptics had cause to think that they might never get their message about the total lack of evidence of any significant global warming let alone any of the claimed catastrophic consequences of such warming, across to the public at large.
What a difference a couple of years make plus Nature’s refusal to bow to the climate alarmists and their models makes in attitudes amongst the skeptics and now amongst the public as the increasing erosion of the heavily propagandized belief in the catastrophic consequences of any supposed anthropogenically created warming of the Planet slowly but at an ever increasing pace, recedes in the public’s consciousness.
The now accelerating fall in the alarmist’s public standings and believability can be put down to two things.
One is the relentless exposure by the skeptic bloggers and commenters of the utter inanity and total lack of any sense of reality or evidence for in the predictions and prophecies now emanating from so much of what claims to be some sort of supposed climate science, This reinforces the perception that climate science promoters have descended into some sort of shaman / witch doctor like pathological fixation with their own agenda and ideology allied with the belief in their own undoubted powers of prophecy and prediction of the future events arising from a catastrophic anthropogenic warming of the planet.
Time has shown that those climate predicting shamans and witch doctors otherwise known as climate scientists, have about the same level of success in their prophecies and predictions as those witch doctors and shamans of more primitive times.
This has now given the skeptics an opening to publicly reveal via the skeptic blogs, the increasingly repetitive and ongoing exposure of the stupidity of so many of these past and failed predictions.
Plus the ever more embarrassing and heavily publicised by the skeptic bloggers, the resultant increasing numbers of back downs and blatant coverups and goal post shifting by the alarmist believers to try and cover for their own stupidity and arrogance in first making such hubris laden and subsequently blatantly wrong predictions and claims in the first place.
The second point is the increasingly marked, almost subtle encouragement, by the skeptics for the continuation of the blatantly over the top, extremist propaganda about the dangers of global warming / climate change and the alarmists linking of such supposed dangerous climate change to common everyday events.
Something the most of the public, reinforced by the barracking of skeptic bloggers and commenters, can see through as totally irrational and ultimately becoming ever more irritable when repeated often enough which the alarmists obligingly are continuing very co-operatively to do with ever greater extremist and far out predictions and claims.
All now carefully stoked and helped along by the skeptic bloggers and commenters.
Thus giving the skeptics further ammunition to take down and expose to an even greater extent the inanities surrounding the ever more extremist irrational claims of the ideologically motivated believers in anthropogenic climate change
A set of points that over the last months the media is slowly starting to take up and in a few cases actively expose which in turn is reinforcing the very many deep down and increasing doubts that large sections of the public have about so much of the catastrophic warming claims as it becomes blatantly obvious that there are no visible or perceivable consequences arising from the global warming that is seen to affect themselves personally or their surrounds and their living conditions nor are likely to in the foreseeable future.
We are finally starting to see and hear the death rattles of the global warming / climate change cult.
Don’t dismiss the realty faced by the hoi polloi. When the temps are -20C, you’re scraping rock-hard ice off your car (praying that the car will start), and some moron is blathering about global warming, you only think two things: global warming my arse, and, I wish there was global warming.
The average global temp (if such a thing has any meaning) may still be warmer than previous years, but many heavily populated areas are experiencing colder weather. That will change the perception faster than anything else.
One more cold winter in the US, and I think judges will have a really hard time agreeing with the EPA’s agenda. They have friends and family, too, and are hearing them say you have to be nuts to believe global warming is real or that a little more warming would be bad. They, too, will be subject to brown-outs when power is limited, as well as skyrocketing power bills.
Suppose this pause in warming lasts 11,000 years? Is it still a pause?
Yes, I noticed this trend a few years ago. Too much barely-weather-related programming and not enough weather. This was especially galling during prime-time, when nobody else was covering the weather. Here’s a great idea, nobody else is reporting or forecasting the weather during these hours, so let’s not either!. Seriously, how about some counter-programming?
There’s also issues with the business model. I can get all the weather I want whenever I want online at any time. If I have a phone signal, I can get weather.
Do the climate kooks not realize the self-inflicted irony? Using phonied up weather reports on so-called global warming makes the rest of their weather reports less, not more, credible. Climate obsession ultimately destroys those infected by it. I hope that Weather Channel goes in even more for reporting on their phony crisis. A new channel actually committed to reporting weather in accurate credible ways will eventually take their place.
We have DirecTV, and I watch Weather Nation, when I want to see what’s going on, or go on the internet. A few months ago, I was watching TWC at night, and they had one of the goofiest shows ever — about what would happen if a tornado hit Washington, DC, or the White House. But then, I guess rapidly rising hot air in that area could cause a tornado. For ” mjmsprt40″, who needed a weather forecast from his hotel in Indianapolis, if you have a DirecTv remote, one of the buttons on the remote brings up the forecast immediately (don’t know how accurate it is).
I can’t remember the name of TWC’s resident hurricane expert, but think he’s almost been put out of a job these past few years.
Must’ve been pretty boring I must say. It’s been pretty boring in Oz too, except the Northwest. Last year there were hardly any cyclone watches. On the tornado thing, doesn’t a tornado need relativly clear air to spin up – that is hot flat ground. It seems to me that spinning up a tornado in a highrise urban environment is practically impossible… Anthony?
I wonder if in 1974 the “Weather in 2014” would feature a blizzard in the middle of summer.
At the hotel I was staying for a while, they had Weather Nation, but still had the program names from the Weather Channel (from Direct TV with their earlier conflict).
So I saw “Two Fat Guys in the Woods” in the listings. I knew it was not an error, at least not the usual kind of error. Perhaps it is an experiment to see how dumb their audience is. Apparently not so much that they don’t switch the channel. (Think frogs jumping out of slowly heating water).
I once described TWC as “Religious programming from the first church of GAIA, some Tru-TV rejects, some human interest rescue or help in floods, tornadoes, or whatever stories and an occasional weather forecast (mainly on the 8s)”. I was originally exaggerating on Tru-TV rejects when I originally wrote that. They managed to turn exaggeration into action.
The back story here is more important and is being missed. This is a WMO sponsored series of adverts. WMO is a UN organization, and with UNEP co-sponsor of IPCC.
TWC is glad to get paid to lend their ‘stars’ to the ads.
All a leadin to UNFCCC 2015 innParis, which will likely fail worse than Copenhagen.
These are just UN paid informercials hyping the upcoming NY meeting, which OBummer will attend but not the leaders of China or India. By themselves, I’m 2013 they were responsible for 34% of global CO2 emissions. North America, EU, Japan, and Aus/NZ were responsible all together for 29%.
Expect a crescendo of such stuff, including more bad papers, until after Paris fails. At that point, the CAGW fever will have broken. Early signs include the number of climate science ‘rats’ now abandoning their sinking ship.
I think the founder of the weather channel says it best. He even gives a shout out to this website
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7P5RW0Tmp-U
Just boycott their trash.
Everything NBC touches gets corrupted. Weather is becoming an afterthought on TWC.
If a record heat wave in Chicago is currently considered to be just weather – not climate change, then why isn’t it just considered to be weather in the 2050 forecast? Oh I forgot, record cold is just weather; record heat is climate change. /sarc off
Maybe Al Jazerra?
Or Al Jazeera.
In any case, Cantore needn’t wet his pants for real as he will surely have a weather gig somewhere.
The local stations in Oklahoma City have better weather coverage during severe weather. Three stations send up helicopters to track the storms, there are maps in the corners of the screens and they will take over programming when it gets really bad. In recent years, TWC just broadcasts the local stations coverage during tornado season.
Since I am on ATT U-Verse, I don’t even get the local weather on the eights – it’s the same general regional info that you get in hotels. So, it’s worthless for local info.
The state and the universities support the Oklahoma Mesonet which is a statewide network of weather monitoring stations. I know a lot of people who just check the Mesonet for weather conditions.
Information from the Oklahoma Mesonet is helpful in may ways, including frequent updates of soil temperatures, which is a great aid for Spring planting. A Mesonet station is within 1 mile of my home, so weather information is at least, close to correct.
Central Oklahoma weather forecasting is supported by the most sophisticated weather radars and forecast modeling systems on the planet, as a survival response to the area’s proclivity for severe weather.
Another ‘cherry picked’ data stream:
“Bloomberg reports that ratings are down 20% over three years…”
Many if not most of us stopped watching TWC a decade or so ago shortly after NBC purchased TWC. I would think the decline in viewership has been consistent over the years and the last three years are just the mid-slope in their ratings plummet.
John Coleman:
Your life’s work is not in ruins!
Perhaps one physical venue that your talents and knowledge brought to fruition is being run into the ground by bean counting climate kool-aid charlatans, but your life’s work lives on. Someone will revive the science and a weather channel focusing on weather science again.
“The Weather Channel is losing viewers to global warming…”
—
It’s pretty bad when an imaginary event like global warming is getting more viewers than you are.
The Weather Channel seems a very different beast in the 20-teens than the cable service I use to view in hotel rooms after and before a flight to another city during the 1990s. I would posit, that is a bad thing.
For the Weather Channel et al. it seems the ruse of ‘Climate Warming’ ‘Global Warming’ ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’ ‘Anthropocene Era’ have gone to the heads of the current staff as the news paper report of the ‘Klondike Gold Rush’ were to the residents of Seattle and San Francisco of the day.
The ‘Klondike Gold Rush’ was just a media frenzy of the day, and little gold or riches to be had, least by the ‘miners, for a heart of gold’.
Sad.
The big 3 (ABC, NBC, CBS) should be arrested for stalking. Fed up with their crummy programming, viewers find channels/ networks that have the programs they want to watch. In turn, the big 3 stalk the viewers, note what channels/ programming they are watching and then they make their move and buy the network\ channel. Before you can say what just happened, they force the viewers to watch the same crap programs and format they ran from. When the viewers get fed up and go elsewhere again, the big 3 try and unload the heap of garbage they created on anyone foolish enough to buy it. It’s got to be a quick sale, they have to stalk all those viewers that have left and buy what ever channels/ networks they are watching and force them to watch the crap they are running from at the big 3!
The WC is runing too many program that are not weather related. Many times at the Eights I can not see my local radar picture and its too green with poor color. I do not like the changes. Every weather event is played up to look like a Disaster, when it is not!~
Few people (and no one I know) considers being sermonized to as entertainment or educational.
And that’s what they’ve all become; Preachers of the Gospel of Al Gore.
Divinity student that he was, it’s natural for him to run propaganda like a church.
The Weather Channel will not be around in 2050.
It is even money on whether the networks will either.
I agree, it’s highly doubtful that any of the networks as we know them will exist. Most likely something completely new will be replacing them. Certainly on-demand internet driven weather is going to be dominant over weather channels. Netflix is on the right path, so huge money will soon be jumping in on that bandwagon. The old guard simply don’t have enough money to buy in.
There has been 22 years of warming in the 74 years since 1940, when does the “warming” become the pause in global cooling?
In my opinion, TWC is the main reason why pay-tv services in general are losing their memberships.
The History channel showing shows about the future, 2nd.
I have an antenna so the wife can still watch the crud that’s being spewed.
Yep, I used to be able to run TWC as background while reading.
I used to be glued to the weather channel during hurricanes, but maybe that was when John Coleman was there…
Nothing more entertaining than watching forecasts of fake heat waves while the actual weather is about earliest recorded snows and below average temps for most of the US. It looked silly.
Good, concise comment. Hope you don’t mind my stealing it and posting it on the TWC site!
Feel free but I doubt it will change many minds over there. Thanks for the compliment!