Weather Channel "Your Local Forecast"

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JerryK

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Supporting Founder
May 25, 2005
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Hi again,

I don't have the weather channel (yet) in my NPS package, but I assume it's just the "national" feed which goes to commercials or something during "Local Forecasts"

My question is, how does the local cable company integrate "Your Local Forecast"?

Isn't that a spot-beam or something via satellite? If it is, will subbing to TWC get me access to that feed?
 
The national feed shows current conditions and radar from the country in segments (NE, SE, Midwest, Texas, NW, SW) during that time.

The local cable company (as I understand it) does it computerized. Just like when there are commercials that the lcoal cable can sell on TBS, CNN, etc (for auto dealers) it automatically inserts it. I've been at my mom's where TWC forgets to add it so we see the National version

Time Warner SHOULD have the local feed. Some areas are not really "local" (depending on how far from a bigger city you are). Otherwise just log on to www.weather.com
 
Thanks for the info. Kind of surprising that the cable company has to manually key it in for TWC.

Guess I'll just stick with the website for now :)
 
They have a computer that interfaces with the Weather Channel feed and receives "cues" to go to those local content, same thing in the case of the natinoal channels that allow local inserts, there is a cue in the feed that will tell the local computer to flip to local content for x number of minutes, syndicated talk shows on radio work in simular manner. Amazing how techology works :)
 
The computer does not use a phone or internet connection. the cue tone mattb describes does set off the computer to swap over to local forecast. It's able to download weather info from it's local point via satellite. These units are set up with 2 locals actually, you have a primary and a secondary local. When the primary local goes down for whatever reason, it would switch over to the secondary. There is a handful of these computers used for the local forecast and only one is being sold now which is offered with a Motorola DCII receiver.
also attached some pictures of different computers and what they look like on screen.
 

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Impressive, looks like the local cable co here uses the "latest and greatest" (the first one) I remember the early days of weather channel growing up as a kid and the old purple non colorful local forcasts, ofcourse back then Time Warner had like 25 channels!
 
I use the fourth one. I have a small area but I did price the newest one though, try $6000. I told them if we was forced to go digital and pay that amount, we would use NBC Weather +. There was no futher comment after that. :D
 
the 1st one i've seen at my mom's (Time Warner)

The 4th is what my uncle has on his (small town cable company) :)
 
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