Why not local radar on dish?

Because it would cost a boatload of money to uplink another 150 channels to bring everyone their local radar. This information is available in enough places that the demand just really isn't there. Local weather forecast on each of your local stations, the internet, the newspaper, etc. Dish Home might still carry it too, haven't checked in awhile to see if it is still there.
 
jkinser,

I can't just turn on my local station and get a radar screen, and if it's 3am they're probably not going to be on anyway. I'm interested in seeing the radar and not some intervening goofball and catchy jingles about the new tire store.

The capability is obviously there to do it, we can get AccuWeather now. This is just one tweak beyond that. We could say it's a public safety issue.


rickaren,

What do you mean?
 
Yeah, it could be done a la the Accuweather method. They provide that for hundreds of cities. It might be difficult to provide live radar sweeps for all, but they could post a static picture and update it every few minutes.
 
Minniapolis St. Paul has a local station that provides aviation weather radar but thats pretty much a locals issue. As far as the weather channel locals on the 8's wich is what Im asuming your asking about it does come down to equipment and cost and lagistics.
 
In most areas at least one digital OTA signal has some sort of radar sweep on a subchannel. ABC and CBS in my area do this.
 
afigbee said:
If DISH can bring me my local channels why not my local weather radar?
afigbee said:
We could say it's a public safety issue.
I don't need another Dish channel for "public safety" radar at additional cost. For non-emergency radar, HDNews and TWC and my local doppler radar internet site are adequate for me. EDIT: my OTA ABC digital subchannel 2 also has continuous radar and weather 24 hours a day.

On my locals when there is a tornado warning or hail warning or flood warning:
(1) my locals go PIP
(2) continuous updated radar
(3) map of counties under alert
(4) alarm noise from TV
(5) scrolling text across the bottom of the screen
(6) backup transmitted verbally on multiple radio stations
 
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While I do think it would be wasteful to uplink live video radar for all local markets 24/7, I think Dish should add static radar pictures to its existing Dish Home Weather application. I can't imagine that it would be difficult.
 
Once they get all the HD content on there (nationals and locals) then maybe they will start looking into at least one radar per state until all the states are covered then go to the different radars in the state. They could also save some badwidth by showing three or four radar areas during each break if that was somehow possible.
 
I completely agree with the original poster. As a recent subscriber to Dish, I was very suprised to see that they did not carry a channel with the radar signal on it. I had TWC, and they TWO channels dedicated....one was a statewide feed, one was a feed from a local newscast that had the weather forecast for like 50 cities statewide for the next 3 days.

Yeah, I could come over to the computer, sure. But if the cable companies can do it, why can't Dish?

And its not about having a warning system in place. Sometimes, I would look at the radar, and say, "oh, there is a line in Indianapolis.....I am in Columbus....I have 3 hours before the rain gets here to cut the grass/re-align the dish/whatever."


Its a convenience thing more than anything.
 
Because your cable company is local, they'd only have to carry 1 channel. Dish would have to put every channel on the satellites and then beam your channel to you and my channel to me. Takes up a lot of space. I wish I had TWC radar at times too but I've gotten over it since I lost it. A few months from now you won't even notice it's gone.

Plus you can't turn on TWC to follow a big storm if you've got no signal... =)>
 
Here in the Grand Rapids, MI market two of our digital OTA stations run full time local weather and radar on their sub-channels. Always on, always available.
 
TWC seems to have more reality programming than weather these days. We have a sub channel broadcasting 24 hour weather via OTA and various means via the internet. The all important weather radio is the real assistant. It would be a nice feature, but not one I would want to pay extra for.
 
Minniapolis St. Paul has a local station that provides aviation weather radar but thats pretty much a locals issue

KTCI 17 (PBS) has it. Its the 2nd PBS in Minneapolis and is on M-F unitl 5 and weekends most of the time unless there is political stuff on there. The main one (KTCA 2) has it on a digital subchannel
 
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