posted 2006/01/21 at 23:29
While we're on the subject of local news ...
Last summer I was looking around on the programme guide on our cable hookup, and noticed that our local CBS affiliate had started its own weather channel. It wasn't all that impressive -- a Bloomberg-like setup with text boxes for forecasts for various communities, and a "big window" that alternated between your standard radar and satellite shots along with pre-taped forecasts and commercials -- and I'm far more likely to get weather information online these days (the weather widget that comes with Yahoo! Widgets is awesome, especially since it includes a block for the current moon phase), but I thought it was interesting, and in all honesty I tended to change the channel to that station over the summer whenever a thunderstorm rolled in, if only for the constantly-updating radar shots.
Fast-forward to last night, as I'm flipping around the programme guide again in a futile effort to forget what a shitty day I've had. I start looking at the listings for the higher-number channels, which I normally don't do since those numbers are usually reserved for HDTV channels, the movie channels we don't get, the pay-per-view movie channels, and the channels for the sports packages. While looking around, though, I found that the local NBC affiliate now had their own 24-hour weather channel, with much the same setup as the CBS channel but with additional feeds that were attributed to AccuWeather. Then I found that the local ABC affiliate had their own 24-hour weather channel as well. To top it all off, I then discovered that the local CBS affiliate, whose own 24-hour weather channel is still going strong, now has another channel that is literally nothing more than a constantly-updated 600-mile radar image.
Honestly, this is the kind of thing I'd expect in big cities like New York or Los Angeles. It seemed odd to me when I found our first local weather channel, not only because Toledo is such a small city to start with, but also because our cable company is locally owned and operated, so it's not like they've got huge resources to work with. To have four different local weather channels, though -- especially the radar channel, which has no commercials whatsoever -- strikes me as pointless overkill.
Let me ask this of those of you who have cable: Do you have locally produced all-weather channels? If so, how many, and are there any "specialty" channels like the all-radar channel I have here?
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon