THE WEATHER NETWORK/METEOMEDIA is not just a couple of weathered TV channels any more.
The company that owns them, Pelmorex Media, is a growing weather and interactive powerhouse. I mean really – when it snows and you’re in the office, which web site do you go to? Which channel gets flipped to first?
The company has long been working beyond TV. It’s had an interactive division since 1995 and millions now visit its 12-year-old web site. In fact, says Pelmorex CEO Pierre Morrissette, he has a database of 250,000 subscribers who have signed up to have weather alerts dropped into their in-box.
And earlier this month, with the purchase of Mississauga’s World Weatherwatch, the company signaled it was getting serious about a new tack: commercial weather forecasting sales.
All this growth and the company just moved into shiny new digs in Oakville, Ont., nearly doubling its old, cramped space in Mississauga.
So what’s next for The Weather Network/Météomédia (which is part-owned by the U.S Weather Channel)? Greg O’Brien, editor and publisher of www.cartt.ca, recently visited Morrissette at his new HQ. What follows is an edited transcript.
Greg O’Brien: Tell me about this new building? What was the reason for the move and what does this new place offer the old one didn’t?
Pierre Morrissette: The previous location we were outgrowing, so we went from 35,000 square feet there to 65,000 square feet. Secondly, the lease was expiring there and we had a very favourable deal as a sublet but we were going to go to market rates. Also, we had to enhance the space for our core areas – the television broadcasting and the forecasting services.
So, this move was a great opportunity to get a space to meet our specific needs and build for our requirements for the long term. And, it turned out to be a very successful move for us.
GOB: How many employees do you have now?
PM: The company overall – including on-call people – is getting close to 350 (which includes about 125 in Montreal). We’re a 24/7 operation, so we don’t have that many people here at one time. We do forecasting around the clock and programming around the clock and provide service to newspapers and other things.
GOB: You were a radio company when you purchased The Weather Network, right?
PM: The company was founded in 1989 and the first acquisition we did was in the radio sector when we acquired 16 mid-sized radio stations in 1990. In 1993, we concluded the acquisition of The Weather Network. We then sold our radio operations in the latter part of 1990 to focus exclusively on the weather-related information services.
GOB: When you bought The Weather Network, did you envision yourself moving beyond TV and media, moving into forecasting tools and selling data to other companies?
PM: At the time, the core was the television operations. The Weather Network/Météomédia launched in 1988 and when we acquired it, it was the first specialty television network to change hands (the prior owner was Lavalin Engineering). It was a little bit of effort to get through the CRTC but (Lavalin) had encountered financial difficulties and this was one of their profitable areas of activity.
So then, the main operation was television and it was a successful operation – but the ratings were very low. It was a business with an excellent infrastructure and engineering capabilities but was not run at the time as a broadcast operation. For instance, there were no advertising revenues, they did not subscribe to the ratings services and the sales force was very limited.
GOB: So they relied on basic carriage and those fees.
PM: That’s what paid the bills. So, the opportunity for us was to implement programming strategies and grow the audience levels and put a sales force in place to convert the ratings into revenue.
Over time, when the Internet started happening, we were a very early participant in that. Theweathernetwork.com and meteomedia.com have been up since 1995. And, we have kept on developing it and improving the penetration and content and bandwidth so that it has evolved where today, it’s one of the leading web sites.
GOB: And in severe weather, the leading web site.
PM: In our business our audience levels on TV, our ratings, and web site user traffic spikes hugely in correlation with weather activity.
Our prime time on television is the morning and typically, we’re one of the leading TV networks but when there’s weather activity, we go from one of the leading networks to the leader.
GOB: Bad weather is good for business.
PM: It makes sense. People have greater need to plan their travel and time and other activities and we are a planning tool. People use us to plan how to best use their time and there’s a safety element to it as well and a health aspect to it, too with ultra-violet rays and air quality. It meets so many different needs in many different ways.
GOB: I’m a skier so I’m always watching the channel and on the web site and in January was cursing all the rain that came down.
PM: I was skiing myself on the weekend and speaking to someone in charge of the hill and he said "boy your name was mud around here in January."
There are so many different market segments, from the general public wondering what to wear today to the ski enthusiasts, golfers in the summer, gardeners, people who run outdoor businesses – each one of those segments has a different information need… Key for us is to understand each of these segments and deliver the right information to them
GOB: Now, the recent acquisition of World Weatherwatch really takes the company in another direction.
PM: We operate three divisions. The television division, the interactive division and the commercial services division – which deals with various industrial clients. The energy sector is one of those – clients such as Hydro One, which we are pleased to inherit with World Weatherwatch. The roads and transportation sector is another important category for us.
This involves having weather stations along the 407, let’s say, which will measure weather activity and will assist the operators of the highway system… doing forecasts on stretches of highway. It’s very helpful in determining when a highway might freeze up. We also supply services to municipalities.
GOB: Do you do much long-term forecasting, trying to figure out what the weather might be next fall, for example?
PM: We put out a monthly forecast and seasonal outlooks but these are broad trends – strictly from the 60,000-foot level, macro-trends. Our focus right now are these three market segments. We’ll look at others in the future but we’ve got our hands full right now.
GOB: Going back to TV, where do you see your channels change in the future? How will they grow?
PM: TV has been the favoured source for weather information for Canadians and I don’t see that changing but what’s happening to television and the transition to digital is that we see a service like ours lending itself very well to interactive television.
On the main channel, we’re limited to 48 minutes of content per hour and our viewers expect a quick hit of information and to move on. So, for us to incorporate as much of the content into 48 minutes and recognizing our viewers only want to come in for a quick fix of weather information for a specific period of time, the interactive platform will allow us to have a menu of content and allow people to go in and pick the information they want.
We already have a service like that with Videotron and we’re very advanced with ExpressVu to launch a new interactive television service for weather. We’re at the trial stage right now.
As most other broadcasters have, we see the trend towards viewers wanting to personalize on demand for what they want to watch when they want to watch it and increasingly, where they want to watch it. So, the availability of programming beyond cable and satellite, into the wireless arena is going to happen.
GOB: And you’re on the MobiTV (wireless television) platform too, aren’t you?
PM: We’ve already signed an agreement with the major wireless carriers for that for our two television channels… This is an evolutionary thing and we see a very stable viewership for our core flagship TV networks but the public out there will have more opportunities to access information when they want to, regardless of where they are.
So, we spend a lot of time developing technologically services and products which will basically position us on the new platforms.
This is what the consumer wants and at the end of the day, personalized, on demand, through the core television services, is a consumer need and we’ll have to find a way to match that.
GOB: Do you see yourself launching any other TV channels?
PM: We never eliminate looking at something new, but that’s not on the drawing board right now… We are a content business and we are constantly working on improving our weather information services, on growing our database, improving our forecasting services and in the weather-related category, developing a bunch of new content applications in the areas of transportation or leisure information or health-related information.
For example, road conditions in the winter time is tied to weather, of course and improving the quality of that information is important – not just reporting the information, but improving traffic flows.
GOB: If I was still commuting full-time, a service I’d pay for would be to get buzzed on my cell phone letting me know at, say 2 p.m., that a rush-hour storm is moving in. Is that the type of thing you’re thinking of?
PM: Our goal is to grow the base of users across all platforms so our approach is not to charge for services but to make quality information available to as many people as possible and then we convert that viewership or traffic into revenue.
GOB: Do you see any opportunities outside of Canada?
PM: I’m sure there are. In the 1990s, we went to Europe and launched a weather service in France and the U.K. and had a license for Italy. But, we decided to leave. The marketplace there is totally different than North America. The distribution is far less developed there. It was going to be such a long-haul, decades, to break even, that we decided not to pursue that.
