Remembering The Weather Cast, the Weather Channel Competitor That Lasted 4 Days

If all memories of The Weather Cast are lost to the fog of time, don’t be surprised — the Weather Channel competitor came and went in just four days. Even snowdrifts stick around longer.

The Weather Cast, a production of the company WeatherNation, launched on Dish Network at midnight on May 21, 2010. In a press release about the new channel, Dish called itself the first and only television provider to offer a national “all weather, all the time” service. Dish said The Weather Cast would replace The Weather Channel, which, in the satellite TV provider’s appraisal, had “recently moved away from weather reporting to a mix of movies and other entertainment-focused programming.” Shade was in the forecast that day.

“In contrast to The Weather Channel, The Weather Cast devotes 100 percent of its program schedule to weather reporting,” Dish added. “There are no movies, no wake-up shows, and no stories about storms.”

What Dish didn’t mention in that press release was any conflict with The Weather Channel. The Los Angeles Times reported Dish Network was pushing back against The Weather Channel’s push for higher fees — specifically, a 10% hike over the 11 cents per month per customer that The Weather Channel was charging at the time.

A Weather Channel spokesperson said that after several months of negotiations, Dish had “chosen to be the first distributor to drop The Weather Channel rather than pay the standard industry rates others in the industry have already agreed to pay,” per HuffPost. The channel even urged Dish’s subscriber base — then around 14 million subscribers — to switch to other pay-TV providers, according to The Denver Post.

Despite Dish’s threats to drop The Weather Channel, though, the long-running cable channel remained available to Dish subscribers. And ultimately, the squall passed On May 24, 2010, the fourth day of broadcast for The Weather Cast, Dish and The Weather Channel announced a new “multiyear agreement for continued distribution,” as The New York Times reported.

And thus, The Weather Cast evaporated, leaving Dish’s lineup on May 24, 2010. (At least some viewers noticed.)

Paul Douglas, the meteorologist who founded WeatherNation, reacted to The Weather Cast’s rise and fall on his blog. “We knew all along there was a risk [Dish] would eventually come to terms with The Weather Channel. Did they use us for leverage, to get a better deal? Absolutely. But there were never any guarantees. Like anything else in business, there was considerable risk, but also a huge upside. It’s business, nothing personal.”

Douglas thanked The Weather Cast’s supporters and its team of 11 meteorologists, half a dozen developers, and three engineers, who worked to create continuous content out of three studios and also “perfected the ability to stream live [HD-quality television on the public Internet.”

Then, in 2014, a similar situation played out at DirecTV amid a carriage dispute between the satellite TV provider and Weather Channel parent The Weather Company, as MediaDailyNews reported.

In a statement at the time, then-Weather Company CEO David Kenny criticized DirecTV for replacing The Weather Channel with a “cheap start-up that does weather forecasting on a three-hour taped loop, has no field coverage, no weather experts.”

And yes, that “cheap start-up” was WeatherNation, the same company that, for four days in May of 2010, broadcast a TV meteorology underdog called The Weather Cast.