The Future of TV Weather: Building Trust and Viewership through Innovation

With the rapid audience shift from television to digital, staying relevant is challenging but necessary for long term viability. Broadcast television is not dead—but it is evolving rapidly and there is a need to transform to avoid becoming irrelevant. Transforming means shifting from serving a TV audience to serving audiences no matter where they are, essentially going from a TV broadcaster to an overall broadcaster.

According to eMarketer, TV viewing time is declining faster than anticipated. In 2019, the TV viewing time per day will be 4 hours 10 minutes and in 2021 it will be 3 hours 37 minutes. 2019 has been a significant year for change, with many viewers making the leap towards digital. Younger generations are watching significantly more TV in online forms, such as mobile streaming apps, instead of on a physical television.

According to Nielsen, the majority of millennials get their news from both TV and digital sources. However, 36% get news only from digital sources, while only 8% get their news from TV alone. Failing to connect with audiences online could have negative consequences for broadcasters looking to expand their reach.

Broadcasters must adapt to these changes in order to stay relevant. Identifying key trends and changes in the industry will help broadcasters determine how to adjust their media strategies, what tactics will lead to success, and how to better prepare for the future.

Major Convergence in Technologies

Luckily there is a convergence in new technologies that will help broadcasters transform:

1. AI (Augmented Intelligence)

Digital consumers want human curated content not automated content. TV stations aren’t going to hire more people to span both television and digital, so how do you serve both well with limited resources? The answer has to be automation, which is in conflict with what users want. This means automated content can’t look automated. How will that be achieved? By using AI. Watson is already being used on-air to perform closed captioning. We will take that to the next level with silent videos using Watson. The key difference is that we are training Watson to pull out the key concepts (not word for word like closed captioning) and layer the text back over the videos, making for a better digital viewing experience. The weather staff can focus on the important weather stories and AI layered automation can fill the rest of the gaps. AI will not only help with content creation it will help with advertising and targeting as well.

2. New Delivery Technology

The second major technology change that is coming is around delivery technologies. I see two major opportunities on this front. The first is ATSC 3.0 which will make for a more interactive and personalized television experience. ATSC 3.0 will provide broadcasters the ability to target content and advertising to TVs just like we can today with mobile devices. The other technology is 5G wireless networks, which will allow for a much richer experience due to higher capacity data delivery.

3. Big Data, Even Bigger Compute Cycles

When IBM bought The Weather Company, they decided to make a sizable investment in improving forecast accuracy by building a new global weather prediction system IBM GRAF (Global High-Resolution Atmospheric Forecast System). The system is the result of a collaboration including TWC, IBM Research and NCAR. GRAF will be the first model to take advantage of data from the Internet of Things (IoT), wind speed and pressure data from aircraft and pressure sensor data from cell phones (where users have opted in to sharing that information), to produce a more accurate representation of the initial conditions for the model.

To handle this massive amount of data and generate model output at a high resolution (3km) for much of the world, GRAF will run on IBM supercomputers driven by Power9 CPUs and will be the first computer model to leverage nVidia GPUs. Getting your information out there doesn’t matter if it’s not the most accurate information possible.

4. More Powerful Consumer Smartphones

Lastly is a big shift that few are talking about, but it will have a meaningful difference for us in broadcast and specifically for rich weather content. The mobile devices themselves are getting better by leaps and bounds. The GPU compute cycle of a modern smartphone is close to the GPU power required to do real-time rendering. Our first real time rendering systems for broadcast (Max) hit the market about 12 years ago and today’s smartphone has almost the same amount of GPU compute.

Any one of the technology shifts I talked about represents big changes for us in broadcast, but what’s even more powerful is the fact that these things are all converging at the same time. Big technology shifts in television used to come in increments of every 5-7 years. We are at the tipping point where these big changes will be layering in every 6-9 months.

5. All Channels (Broadcast and Digital)

The web allowed us to expand to a whole new channel, but it was just the beginning. OTT gives us all new channels to help with viewership and targeted advertising. Broadcast is being re-defined. It used to mean television and now it gets grouped with digital. Digital is a broad term that covers social, web, mobile and OTT and going forward broadcast media has to cover all of these channels natively.

Final Thoughts

While the industry is constantly changing, the core value and responsibility of broadcasting remains the same—to educate, inform and provide critical life-saving information to viewers.

Broadcast marketers should remember that getting users the information they need is important but providing engaging and high-quality content is what allows your broadcast to resonate in the minds of viewers.