Customizing Downloaded Content from The Weather Company
There are over 700 scenes available for download from The Weather Company, an IBM Business. Broadcast meteorologists can download these scenes for free and add them to their daily weather presentations. Some are more popular than others, so it’s not unusual to see the same bus stop forecast, holiday forecast, and other explainer scenes on more than one TV station in the market. It seems like every broadcast meteorologist uses the same weather calendar.
How do you differentiate your weather coverage from the competition when every station uses the same content? You do it with customization!
Most broadcast meteorologists update the background and add custom banners to the downloaded scenes. However, that’s not enough to make your scene look much different from the competition.
Customizing the individual elements within the scene or combing them with additional elements from other scenes can transform it into something new. After some updated styling, the weather calendar below looks completely different from the downloaded version.
Editing to the original scene was minimal. Fonts were updated to match the station look. The dynamic panels showing the data for each day were stretched out to make them more rectangular, and the colors and transparency of the background panels were adjusted to make them more muted. Finally, extraneous details like the days along the top of the calendar and the number of days above/below normal were removed to produce a cleaner visual.
Additional editing to the dynamic panels and adding a scenic background change the look again.
Another option is to add the content to a Max Reality scene. Here, the updated weather calendar is positioned over a 3D element that appears to rise out of a hole in the floor.
Audience research tells us that viewers think all TV weathercasts are the same. That perception is reinforced when every TV station uses the same weather content.
Spend a few minutes customizing the individual elements within the downloaded scenes to create unique content for your weather hits. Or combine the elements from different scenes together to create something completely new.
Tim Heller is an AMS Certified Broadcast Meteorologist, Talent Coach, and Weather Content Consultant. He helps local TV stations and broadcast meteorologists communicate more effectively on-air, online, and on social media.