Weather Channel Tackles Criticism For Airing Too Much Fluff, With New Ads Attacking Competitors For Airing Too Much Fluff

from the windy-glass-houses dept

Last year, we noted how The Weather Channel's tendency to air a higher volume of fluff and nonsense was harming the company's leverage and negotiating power when demanding higher rates from cable operators. DirecTV, you'll recall, responded to The Weather Channel's demands by simply pulling the channel and replacing it with weather services that, well -- actually reported the weather. Amusingly, many users found this to be an improvement over the channel's usual approach to reporting the weather: funny pictures of buffalo, photos of "sexy beaches," or programs like "Prospectors."

Having not learned a valuable lesson, last month The Weather Channel made the same demands from Verizon, which, like DirecTV before it, simply responded by replacing the weather channel with AccuWeather and directing users to apps that actually forecast the weather. Initially, The Weather Channel tried to claim Verizon was toying with the public's safety. It then launched a website aimed at generating outrage among viewers, urging them to contact Verizon and complain.

Except, given the growing disdain consumers have for a company that has increasingly stumbled away from its core mission, none of this appears to be working. As such, The Weather Channel has come up with a great new idea: mocking other weather organizations for focusing too much on fluff, and not enough on the weather. In a letter to employees, The Weather Channel CEO David Kenny calls Verizon "reckless" and urges employees to cancel all Verizon services. He then tears into AccuWeather for focusing on hippos during a recent tornado emergency in Oklahoma:

"We saw that last Wednesday night, when we featured live coverage from Oklahoma. Interestingly, Accuweather took a shot at the NWS for calling the tornado potential “low” that day, yet the Accuweather network itself, as you can see in the image below, was not even covering weather during Oklahoma’s severe outbreak. Here’s their coverage on the left: Yes, hippos swimming."

Yes, that's a channel that has been mercilessly mocked for years about its tendency to air fluff, attacking other channels for airing too much fluff. For good measure, The Weather Channel decided to up the ante and launch a new media and print campaign that also mocks AccuWeather for showing hippos when a tornado struck Oklahoma: AccuWeather CEO Barry Meyers quickly responded to the ad campaign by pointing out that AccuWeather isn't offered in Oklahoma. He also ponied up some advice about stones and glass houses:

"In 168 hours of week, the amount of programming they have devoted to real weather is really small,” Myers said. “People need to judge what that means." "People need to ask themselves what The Weather Channel is so afraid of,” Myers added. “They’ve had a virtual monopoly for 30-some years. They almost lost with DirecTV , and they have lost with Verizon. Competition is good, and it offers people choice and strengthens products."

The Weather Channel does slowly appear to be learning that you don't have much negotiating leverage when nobody thinks your product is very good. Serious coverage has ramped up slightly and its website's dumbest videos now at least have some tangential connection to actual weather forecasting. Still, it would be nice if The Weather Channel could learn this lesson without the heavy dose of head-spinning hypocrisy.

Filed Under: fluff, tv, weather
Companies: accuweather, direct tv, verizon, weather channel

Spy Stories From The Murdoch Empire: News Corp Fights With Itself In Grand Game Of Espionage

from the corporate-spy-vs-corporate-spy dept

Back in 2008, News Corp (owners of satellite providers DirecTV) was sued by DISH Networks for allegedly hacking their competitors satellite smartcards and flooding the market with them. News Corp (sort of) lost that lawsuit. Following News Corp's more recent high-profile hacking scandal related to News Of The World, more accusations of satellite hacking emerged, this time in the UK.

But amidst all the lawsuits and accusations, it turns out there are some other fascinating stories to be found in News Corp's world of competitive corporate hacking and private security. A new book by Neil Chenoweth, Murdoch's Pirates, digs into that world and turns up some pretty fascinating results. From an excerpt published in the Sydney Morning Herald, we get the story of some befuddled inter-agency espionage between News Corp and its own subsidiary, complete with aliases, informants, moles and a cross-border escape gambit by a spy on the run.

The story is complex, but I'll attempt to summarize. In the late 90s, NDS (the branch of News Corp that deals with private security and anti-piracy activities) sent top hacker Oliver Kömmerling undercover to Toronto, under the pseudonym Alex, with a mission: pose as a satellite pirate and infiltrate the rings selling hacked DirecTV smartcards. Oliver was also one of the hackers directly involved in the hacking of competitors' smart cards, but in this case he was being put to work defending News Corp's own satellite operation. But NDS made one big mistake: they never told DirecTV, which had its own security/anti-hacking division led by a former FBI agent, and they believed Oliver was still a bonafide satellite pirate at large. They had no idea he was now working for NDS—and one of the Canadian hackers Oliver met with turned out to be working for DirecTV, and ratted him out to them. Moreover, no matter NDS or Oliver's intentions, he was breaking the law by hacking and selling smart cards to track down the "real" hackers—so he ended up facing potential arrest or detainment at the border.

As a result, the two security divisions (both ultimately owned by News Corp) played spy-games with each other, and for the details you really should just read the whole story. It's fascinating, and quite funny—and it also raises some interesting questions about how big corporations should approach this kind of security. In one way, I actually think some of the principles here are the right way to approach things—investigate the biggest commercial pirates until you have enough evidence to either bring a lawsuit against them or pass the case along to a criminal prosecutor. That's better than having the government act as corporate police. However, big problems arise when companies start breaking the law in the course of their investigation—as much as they might want to play spy, they don't get the exemptions that law enforcement and intelligence agencies do. It's also highly troubling when their investigations are intertwined with law enforcement, such as when FACT in the UK joined the police raid on the SurfTheChannel offices—that's crossing a line between private interests and government. But then, on top of all that, you have the potential for a comedy of errors like this one: News Corp spending lots of resources to put a man in significant danger in a foreign country, for the sake of hacking its own products, and spurring its own property to put more resources into tracking down a hacker that was supposed on be on their side. At some point you have to ask: what is security worth? And how likely is it to be effective against hackers if it is disorganized to the point of farce?

Filed Under: espionage, hacking, satellite tv
Companies: direct tv, nds, news corp.