Weather Channel’s Highly Successful Mobile App Is Destroying Its Highly Successful Cable Channel

January 16, 2014 Leave a comment

Weather Channel’s Highly Successful Mobile App Is Destroying Its Highly Successful Cable Channel

JIM EDWARDS

JAN. 14, 2014, 9:32 AM 379

The Weather Channel is in a contract dispute with DirecTV that underlines just how vulnerable some cable TV channels are to mobile apps that provide similar need-to-know content.DirecTV wants Weather Channel to take a 20% cut in the fees it pays to carry Weather Channel, in part because Weather Channel’s audience has fallen 19% to 214,000 since 2011, according to Nielsen. DTV has blacked out the channel since Monday night.

The TV audience decline has come at the same time Weather Channel’s mobile app has exploded in popularity. Because the app does something useful everyday, it’s one of the few apps people download, use, and don’t delete when they’re bored of it. It was the 10th most popular free iPad app last year. More than 100 million people have downloaded it across all devices.

What’s happening, obviously, is that people are changing their habits: They’re checking the weather on their phones, and not the TV. It’s hard to see Weather Channel reversing that trend, and indeed the station has changed much of its formatting from a 24/7 news cycle with anchors and correspondents to more drama-documentaries, such as “Hawaii Air Rescue.”

The channel still gets viewer spikes during big storms, the WSJ noted:

David Kenny, chief executive of the channel’s parent, Weather Co., disagrees [with DTV’s demand]. “At the time of severe weather, TV is still where people go,” he says. DirecTV’s request for a “huge” fee reduction “didn’t make sense, and we couldn’t be the same service” if it was implemented, he added.

Filed under TMT Trends

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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