Oddly enough, The Weather Channel makes for a pretty great streaming service

Image: The Weather Channel

The Weather Channel doesn't want to win you over by spending a lot on House of Cards. It isn't interested in The Office next time it comes up, nor is it interested in football.

TWC launched a streaming service. The Weather Channel costs either $2.99 a month or $29.99 a year. The main screen of the app replicates what you would see on cable. That's what viewers were looking for, according to Zimmett. TWC decided to just stream its channel rather than reinventing itself for streaming.

This is a new idea in the streaming world. Most networks have linear TV deals that specify when and where content is allowed to appear, that's why most shows only stream after they air, and some don't stream at all. That causes a big problem for news, sports, and other timely content. Who will stream a live news report from last week or last night? Those linear deals are very lucrative for those networks, and most are not eager to dump cable before they have to. CNN tried to build an entirely new lineup of live shows rather than simply streaming its existing ones. We all know how that went.

We are at a weird point in our industry, where we have only one foot in cable and one foot in streaming. All companies are trying to figure out how to keep both sides happy, legally, financially, and everything else in between. The new streaming service isn't likely to make the carriers happy, and The Weather Channel has had its fair share of fee disputes.

The Weather Channel is owned by IBM and is an entirely separate entity from the TV network. You can only stream the service on TVs, according to the FAQ. Which is a disappointment.

The Weather Channel is a study in how to make a linear-TV channel feel more internet-y. You are dropped into the linear feed when you open The Weather Channel's streaming app. The blue ticker at the bottom? Everything you need to know right now is in that feed. You can call up a full-screen radar to see what's happening, and then watch the live show from one corner of the screen. I spent most of my time in that view, with local weather on most of the screen and the news and shows on the rest, and all I could think was, "Doctor's Waiting Room TV written all over it."

Image: The Weather Channel

Wait, hang on, who watches The Weather Channel? The phone tells me if it's raining. The answer is more people than you think, but the outlook isn't great, as TWC's total viewership has grown over the last couple of years, but it's losing ground with younger viewers. Those are the people that TWC hopes to reach with its streaming service. As climate change becomes more important, she thinks there is more to the weather than the forecast.

Our superpower is visualization, according to Zimmett. The Unreal Engine-powered animation that showed what a nine-foot Hurricane Florence storm surge might look like is one of the mixed-reality graphics that TWC has been known for. I don't need a 2D map with orange and yellow colors over it if I feel like my family is in danger due to a storm.

There are many places The Weather Channel could and doesn't embrace this type of personalization. I watched a few hours of the service while a red tornado warning was in the bottom right corner, but I didn't know anything else.

The Weather Channel has some on-demand content, though it is mostly short clips and explainers. She says she has plans. TWC has some original programming, including the recently nominated Uncharted Adventure. The new shows will be made available on-demand on the streaming service 48 hours before they appear on the live network. I did watch a few episodes of the game. It is a fun show, like a mix between a travel vlog and Man vs. Wild.

The streaming service is already changing the way TWC thinks about its programming. She thought about the future of weather coverage as she was inspired by streaming sports. If we are covering 10 storms at once, and there is an automatic channel that whenever you are getting close to landfall, we are going to take you.

The weather is still the center of attention here. It has never been better to be The Weather Channel. The kind of thing that makes a viewer flip to TWC is the fact that climate change is making the weather more volatile and natural disasters more frequent. Hurricane season is just about to start, and the NOAA is predicting it will be an above-normal year. Though you could accuse the company of occasionally doing that, it does love horrifying storm footage, but to educate people about the science behind the weather.

There is no chance that The Weather Channel will be your go-to entertainment platform. Maybe it doesn't have to. As the world shifts to streaming, the company is betting that a lot of viewers will want it to be more convenient and less expensive. It is both personalized and a shared experience, both always-on and on-demand, and still only a couple of clicks away. Once it gets to Apple TV and other platforms. There is always going to be something to watch with the weather getting more crazy.