History of The Weather Channel

The Weather Channel is an American basic cable and satellite television channel owned by The Weather Company (a consortium owned by NBCUniversal, The Blackstone Group and Bain Capital) that focuses on national and international weather information; although in recent years, the channel has also incorporated entertainment-based programs related to weather on its schedule. This article details the history of the channel, which dates back its founding to around 1980.

Prior to the channel's launch, the original concept for providing continuous weather reports to the public over television stations stretched as far back as the late 1950s and early 1960s on the varying incarnations of CATV. Through those systems, which typically brought in up to a dozen stations to the viewer from across the region, twelve slots on a cable dial would often leave a few vacancies.

Early cable providers then devised a system where a single black and white camera, often one that was formerly used for local news production after an upgrade, would be placed on a rotating pedestal, capturing various dials and gauges on different stations to which it would pan automatically and remain in a given view for a few seconds before moving on. The different stations featured the time, temperature, barometer, wind speed, wind direction, and wind chill factor. Slides with the day's complete forecast, brief news headlines and community events often drawn up by the station's art department rounded out the package. This was the same system as that used by the early Devotional Channels and for the Stations of the Cross during the Christmas season.

The Weather Channel itself was the brainchild of veteran television meteorologist John Coleman (former chief meteorologist at WLS-TV in Chicago and Good Morning America forecaster), who took his idea to Frank Batten, the then-chief executive officer of Landmark Communications. A major part of the plan for the new network was that it would be able to provide localized weather information to its viewers. This would be done through the use of specialized computer units, known as WeatherStars ("STAR" being an acronym for "Satellite Transponder Addressable Receiver"), which would be installed at the headends of cable providers that agreed to carry the channel. These WeatherStars were able to insert current local conditions, forecasts and weather warnings over the national feed, with the weather data being received from the vertical blanking interval of the TWC video feed and via satellite, which is then transmitted to the WeatherStar unit; the WeatherStar systems would also be capable of adding or removing segments seen during each local forecast segment, and providing other forms of non-forecast data (primarily local contact and address information for businesses advertised on the channel's national feed, which the STAR unit overlaid on a static graphic seen after certain commercials). The Weather Channel, Inc. was founded in Atlanta, Georgia on July 18, 1980.

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