Why People Don’t Want Weather Alerts Breaking Their Television Viewing
In the past day or two, we’ve had a lot of tornadoes and severe weather run through much of the midwest. Sometime next week, we will see a lot of local coverage of Hurricane Hermine blustering through Florida and possibly Louisiana again. Inevitably, people will complain that the weather breaks interrupts their viewing of any broadcast, including reruns of shows. And it seems to me that this kind of complaining is increasing. I have a some reasons what that seems to be happening.
- Television viewers are older. Between the cable cutting and internet only streaming, it seems the younger generations are less likely to watch television as we know it. Even so, the cable and satellite providers only are required to broadcast emergency broadcasts. And I think we’re at the point where we’re expecting this kind of subtly to happen on local stations too. And thus, they are expecting local stations to be more like their cable brethern and be more discreet about such alerts. But I think there’s a bigger problem.
- More people are getting their weather sources from smartphone apps. I really believe more people are getting and actually trusting the weather information they are getting from any number of smartphone weather apps, including the ones most local networks hawk during the severe weather coverage. A lot has been said about how inaccurate these apps are far into the future, especially the ones that have a 45 to 90 day weather forecast. However, the problem isn’t that. Most people are just interested in two things: what’s the temperature going to be tomorrow, and will it rain/snow tomorrow? And the apps have made it seem like there’s a pin-point forecast for the very longitude and lattitude that their GPS system is telling the app where it is, and it’s usually designed so that it gives the appearance giving it the high, the low, and a yes/maybe/no answer on whether it will rain or snow. And that’s all people are wanting now days, no more rambling about what the temperature was today or how does the television meteorologist think the storms will ride through.
And many apps actually are now boasting about accurate their app’s forecasts are. The 4½ star rated AccuWeather app boast from one reviewer, “After downloading several and being dissatisfied, I remembered how I had watched accuweather religiously on my pc in the months before my October wedding. It didnt fail me then, and it is even more awesome now.” Most reviews and positive tweets talk about how well their apps can accurately forecast what happens within the next 18–36 hours, which is something that most apps algorithms can handle with good accuracy.
I agree with many that this is a bad sign when people feel more at ease with smartphone weather apps than a television meteorologist. And I’m not sure what needs to be done to a) get people more willing to allow vital information to be broadcasted that may be for some people but not for them, and b) give them the patience to wade through the information that they think they need, and not realize that everyone will need the information the meteorologist gives every night.
The complaint about the future used to be how people grew impatient and wanted their food, drink, or report completed now, and then yesterday. Now we’re at the next step, where people just want the exact information they want for them now or yesterday, and nothing else that would be extraneous to them. This is why local networks, including newspapers and radio stations, are in big trouble.