Outsourcing The Weather |
 Dave Thurlow, Host |
I bet you thought your local weather forecast was made locally. But actually you could live in say, Arizona or Colorado and your local forecast might come from just outside Boston? Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow and this is The Weather Notebook.
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In most cases, your local forecast is NOT truly a local forecast. But in a growing number of markets, radio and TV stations are using simpler and less expensive ways to produce a local forecast. It's called "out-sourcing" the weathercast to businesses such as Weather Systems Incorporated, in Billerica Massachusetts. I recently spoke about this with Rick Slubin at WSI about this rapidly growing industry.
"As opposed to having a TV station hiring meteorologists, complete weather staff and buy all this expensive equipment and have the chroma-key board that they stand in front of and so forth. Just pay a nice neat monthly fee and have us send the weather show down to them...you don't have to worry about system problems, you don't have to worry about paying all the salaries for a weather staff. Just have one guy up here build the show and send it out."
Stations receive the forecast information via a high-speed modem, which is saved into a playback box at the station...
"And all they have to do is hit a button that says, Play Show. And they go on air with it right from there. And we supply them with the scripts, so they know what the forecast is and so forth. So, it's getting to that point in some markets...completely hands-off and we do all the work here."
Or at one of the many companies that is in the business of taking weather information from anywhere and producing weather casts FOR anywhere. The Weather Notebook is in fact not produced at your local radio station but produced right here at the base of Mount Washington in North Conway, NH. Our show is funded by the National Science Foundation with support from Subaru, the beauty of All-wheel drive.