Weather Channel shines with mobile
ATLANTA -- When The Weather Channel launched, media types snickered: Who would want to see a 24-hour cable TV channel devoted to nothing but weather?
No one is laughing now as The Weather Channel prepares for its 30th anniversary in April. The company — owned by private investors and NBC-Universal, in which Comcast has a controlling stake — wisely diversified into a web and mobile property with an unforgettable name: weather.com
The website is one of the top 20 online sites, according to comScore Media Metrix, and registered 1.1 billion online page views in October. Even more people checked the weather on their phones and tablets: racking up 1.3 billion page views.
"Weather is the perfect mobile product because you want to know what the weather is where you are," says Michael Kelly, CEO of the Weather Channel Cos.
The number of mobile phones in use worldwide could reach 2 billion by 2013, up from 1.7 billion today, according to research firm Gartner. Mobile will surpass TV in
"less than two years," predicts Cameron Clayton, Weather's executive vice president for digital content.
When the shift occurs, "it will really turbocharge the two-way communication between us and consumers," says Clayton, advancing the concept of mobile users as "citizen meteorologists" who tell the company what the weather is like where they live, and share that information with the Weather community.
Weather was smart to get in on mobile early, says James McQuivey, an analyst with Forrester Research. "They're the brand name. If you have a new operating system, a new phone, a new tablet, you go to Weather to make sure you've got it, because it's what everyone wants."
Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet, which went on sale Monday, shipped with a Weather app pre-loaded, just as Apple did with the iPhone and iPad, where the pre-loaded Weather app is fueled with Weather.com info.
The app on Kindle follows in the footsteps of the recent October update of the Weather iPad app, adding imagery to the local weather. For instance, if it's raining in Cleveland, you get a background picture of the rain with the forecast. There are 40 different "weather triggered" photos in both apps.
Weather was one of the first apps on the iPad and was developed before the device's launch. To comply with Apple's penchant for secrecy, Weather executives had to agree to create the app at Apple while holed up in a windowless room for 4 1/2 weeks.
"We had no idea how users would use the app," Clayton says. "We're a lot wiser now."
In updating the iPad app, "We've learned that they think of the iPad as a high-def TV they carry around with them, and they want really vivid imagery as the primary storytelling mechanism. They want an experience."
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There are other weather providers. Garmin's MyCast Weather is available as a paid app for the Apple and Android platform. WeatherBug, owned by Earth Networks and IAC, offers free versions of its app for Apple and Android devices. But neither app has the traction of weather.com, which is No. 14 on Apple's chart of most downloaded free iPad apps, and No. 44 on the iPhone chart.
That Weather has succeeded so well on phones and tablets shows that mobile has become "the primary computing platform," says Chris Silva, an analyst with the Altimeter Group.
Weather's iPad app offers vastly updates every 15 minutes, along with colorful maps and clips from Weather's vast library of TV programming.
Which begs the question: If Weather succeeds in surpassing its cable TV audience via mobile, can other cable networks pull that off too?
"The easy answer is no," says McQuivey. "This is unique. Weather you want to take with you everywhere. You don't need to do that for VH1 to find out gossip about the latest Lady Gaga video."
However, peek five years into the future, when there will be a general blurring of the lines between TVs and tablets, he says. "By then, Weather probably won't even break out the distinction, because all the platforms will deliver."
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