At midnight Eastern time, The Weather Channel’s new iPad app went live in the app store. This summer the East Coast earthquake and hurricane-turned-tropical-storm Irene showed everyone how social weather can really become. Cameron Clayton, EVP of Digital at The Weather Channel (TWC) is very correct when saying his company is the “largest location-based services company in the world.” TWC reaches 100 million households, 6o million unique site visitors, 50 million iPhone downloads and 5 million iPad downloads – all based around local weather.
During Irene they worked out a special deal with the MSOs so they could stream a whopping 700,000 streams on Facebook until the Sunday afternoon when the storm died down. Oh yeah, they also built a Twitter app that curates tweets about the weather in real time, around the lock.
Watch the video demo of the new app, designed under the leadership of Clayton and Scott Jensen, Vice President of Digital Products and Apps at The Weather Channel. With graphically pleasing weather displays, news and social content, a fun spinnable globe and HD video – this sure does resemble what every television station will hopefully look like in an interactive environment. On the social front, in addition to Twitter and Facebook, they’ve also integrated their own social platform iWitness so anyone can upload weather tips and sightings, which often get featured on-air.
They also continue to improve on their TV show offerings with shows like Storm Riders. The only question remains is when will they acquire @weather on Twitter from ScienceNewsBlog.com and for how much?