Comparisons To Other Weather Channels
The channel has similarities and differences to its main competitor, The Weather Channel, and counterpart digital service Weatherscan. The AccuWeather programming lineup provides national and regional video forecasts. In addition, there are AccuWeather travel, sports, and lifestyle segments. Most local affiliates add their own local weather updates and some even include local news and traffic updates. Each segment's length, including advertisements and local segments, is denoted by a playback bar along the bottom portion of the video portion, allowing a viewer to always know how long before their segment of interest will air.
Unlike The Weather Channel, The Local AccuWeather Channel has an L-bar format (which is implemented on Weatherscan and is extremely similar to the former NBC Weather Plus L-bar) so that, even when the video window is playing content such as a national forecast, local information is always available around the periphery of the screen. A station can either utilize the default setup of having segment names scroll below the video window, or display a scrolling news ticker of headlines, traffic or weather information. The data area's background image is also changed every hour in order to prevent LCD burn-in.
The channel goes into a special mode when severe weather occurs, like Weatherscan. Several affiliates also break from the Local AccuWeather content when breaking news occurs and the station wants to utilize the subchannel for either extended news and weather coverage, or to push main channel programming to the subchannel. Weatherscan, however, does not feature any on-camera meteorologists, as its content is generated completely by weather computer at the cable headend.
The major difference between The Weather Channel and AccuWeather is that all national and regional weather forecast segments are not broadcast live on AccuWeather but are on The Weather Channel; AccuWeather pretapes all of its weather forecasts every few hours, which poses a problem during severe weather events when current warnings are not able to be carried out by AccuWeather's on-camera meteorologists (The Weather Channel has always had its meteorologists disseminate current severe weather warnings on-air during severe weather events due to its live forecast format).
Unlike NBC Weather Plus, the broadcast television affiliates with The Local AccuWeather Channel are not affiliated with one single network. Many of the stations are affiliated with the CBS, Fox, and especially the ABC networks. For the most part, the local stations do not label the AccuWeather service as a so-called "Local AccuWeather Channel". Instead, the local stations choose to have their own names such as "Weather Now". Also, there is no separate logo for the channel. In most places, the channel carries the station brand and either the AccuWeather.com brand or a statement such as "powered by AccuWeather.com". Local affiliates can add content to the Local AccuWeather content that is either weather or other; the most prominent example is in the KNXV-TV GoAZ.tv implementation, which relies less on the weather content and more on traffic maps and text cards featuring road closure information.
Read more about this topic: The Local Accu Weather Channel
Famous quotes containing the words comparisons, weather and/or channels:
“I don’t like comparisons with football. Baseball is an entirely different game. You can watch a tight, well-played football game, but it isn’t exciting if half the stadium is empty. The violence on the field must bounce off a lot of people. But you can go to a ball park on a quiet Tuesday afternoon with only a few thousand people in the place and thoroughly enjoy a one-sided game. Baseball has an aesthetic, intellectual appeal found in no other team sport.”
—Bowie Kuhn (b. 1926)
“Every incident connected with the breaking up of the rivers and ponds and the settling of the weather is particularly interesting to us who live in a climate of so great extremes. When the warmer days come, they who dwell near the river hear the ice crack at night with a startling whoop as loud as artillery, as if its icy fetters were rent from end to end, and within a few days see it rapidly going out. So the alligator comes out of the mud with quakings of the earth.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Television is becoming a collage—there are so many channels that you move through them making a collage yourself. In that sense, everyone sees something a bit different.”
—David Hockney (b. 1937)