Jim Cantore got bumped from Dan Patrick’s show because of the Weather Channel carriage dispute with DirecTV. DirecTV owns Patrick’s show (which also airs on NBC Sports Network) and the company didn’t think it was a good idea to have on one of the Weather Channel’s biggest stars in the middle of the carriage fight. Cantore was booked to give a Super Bowl forecast this week. The show will instead use Paul Douglas, a former local news meteorologist in Minneapolis who created WeatherNation, which DirecTV now carries in place of Weather Channel.
“We like Jim and thought, under the circumstances, that it may be a bit awkward for him to appear on a DirectTV-owned show so we let him off the hook,” a DirecTV spokesman tells the LA Times’ Joe Flint.
Meanwhile, the Weather Channel took out more full-page ads today, this time taking a shot at DirecTV CEO Mike White who said late last week, “I can assure you 99.9995% of our current customers have voted to stay on the DIRECTV platform.”
That would be about 100 customers. The Weather Channel figures about 190,000 DirecTV customers would commit to switching services over the loss of TWC.
DirecTV subscribers are entering their second week without the Weather Channel.