Tonight we showed viewers our newest channel 2News Weather Plus. It took
us 2 minutes to explain it, but we've been working in it for a couple of months now.
It is a channel with all local and national weather and it runs 24 hours a day.
Weather Plus does what The Weather Channel once did, it actually covers the
weather. Now on TWC, you are lucky if you can catch a weather update, they now
are mostly concerned with doing programs about various subjects. That is all
well, unless you want to find out what the forecast is for tomorrow. As I type this,
The Weather Channel is showing a 30 minute program on surfing, but Weather
Plus is covering the rain in the southern plains.
We wanted to have more than just a loop of local weather radar and a
recorded forecast, so we added a few things you can only see here. We added
live cameras from: Midtown Tulsa, Downtown Tulsa, our Brookside Camera, and
live cameras in Okmulgee, Henryetta, Mannford, Muskogee, Pryor, and Bartlesville.
(we will add more live cameras later)
We also added detailed forecasts for 12 cities. These show the temp, wind,
rain chances, and sky cover for every 3 hour period. It cycles through
Vipir 2, Double Doppler 2, and our meteorologist doing weathercasts.
I watched some of the national coverage today on Weather Plus and
was impressed. They had live report from the fires in the west and another
reporter in the SE talking about the continued drought. The on-camera
meteorologists were good and I found myself watching it for about 20 minutes,
when I should have been working.
There will be some cases when we do severe weather coverage live
on both our regular KJRH channel as well as our digital 2.2 channel. I see
the day when we do some of our extended severe weather coverage on our
digital channel but not on our regular KJRH channel. Perhaps when more
folks have access, we can say on the air, "we are going to take you back to
regular programming now, but for those of you with digital 2.2 we will
continue our coverage."
One of our engineers found a 12" digital television at Wal Mart for $99.
It is not high definition, but you can see digital programs with an antenna
for free! Remember the day before cable when television didn't cost you
anything? They stuck an antenna on our building here on Brookside and
can watch 2News Weather Plus at digital 2.2. That is pretty cool.
In Tulsa you can find it on cable channel 222. Our hope is other cable outlets
will be adding this to their lineup. If you can't find it in your town, call your local
cable company and ask them to add it. Look for us to add even more weather
elements to the new channel in the future.
It would be great to get your feedback on the new channel. Good,
bad, or ugly, let me know what you think about our 2News Weather Plus,
by writing me at: threlkeld@kjrh.com Time to get out of here for the night,
want to catch Conan, and a little Weather Plus.
Dan