NBC-U,along with Bain Capital and the Blackstone Group, have agreed to acquire The Weather Channel from Landmark Communications for a figure reported to be $3.5 billion. The deal is the first of several sell-offs for Landmark, which also hopes to sell Dominion Enterprises, a classifieds giant, and The Virginian Pilot newspaper.
Landmark had apparently been hoping to get $6 billion for The Weather Channel, which was launched 26 years ago and includes Weather.com, Weather Services International and a maker of weather radar systems based. The Weather Channel’s content is seen on thousands of sites and broadcast stations that syndicate it.
NBC-U actually already owns a minor weather service. But one of the key attractions of owning the Weather Channel is the high volume of targeted business travel and local traffic it receives. Everything on the channel and the Web site is geo-targeted by city name or zip code. By some measures, in fact, Weather.com is one of the biggest “local” sites.
Theoretically, Weather.com could be combined with other high volume local verticals such as sports and news to form the foundation of a powerful set of content that can work as a destination and as syndicated package on other sites. NBC-U’s various sales channels could also be put to work.
The Weather Channel also has strong potential for mobile content, where it has been a pioneer in working with various carriers and top news sites.
Summer reading tip: Anyone wanting a good read about the real challenges of creating a vertical channel should read Frank Batten’s account of starting The Weather Channel.
Great point, Peter. A couple of adds:
1. Here’s a summary of Batten’s book on the HBS site:
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/2989.html
2. Connecting Weather.com to broader local search activity may be harder to execute than it seems. Having had experience with a major mapping site, I saw first hand that convincing people to move from maps and directions to keyword-based local search (or even category-based local search) was extremely difficult.