The Weather Company to help WKRC-TV enhance its severe weather coverage with Max Alert Live

Predictive storm tracking solution offers hyperlocal, street-level severe weather and news alerts 
across 70+ stations within Sinclair Broadcast Group

ATLANTA – October 29, 2024 – To help keep their communities safe and informed of the latest weather information, broadcasters need accurate, compelling and flexible tools built on the latest technology. On-screen crawling alerts deliver some of the most critical updates during severe weather threats, when stations see large spikes in viewership. The Weather Company today announced that WKRC-TV, Sinclair Broadcast Group’s television station in Cincinnati, has recently upgraded its weather alerting platform to Max Alert Live from The Weather Company to help ensure the reliability and trust its viewers depend on. Sinclair Broadcast Group has also made the tool available to over 70 of its U.S. stations.

“When severe weather strikes, our viewers depend on us to deliver urgent updates that keep their families safe,” said John Gumm, chief meteorologist at WKRC-TV. “With Max Alert Live, I can see storms coming with an incredible level of granularity and quickly communicate those threats in a flexible manner. I can automatically broadcast and visualize county-by-county storm threats without disrupting programming.”

Max Alert Live is a severe weather alerting platform that helps broadcasters stay ahead of weather threats so viewers can stay in the know. Reliable data and graphics from The Weather Company, the world’s most accurate weather forecaster,¹ help pinpoint the path, timing and intensity of storms down to a specific neighborhood up to 6 hours in advance. Max Alert Live then automatically renders the alerts, allowing WKRC to keep its viewers updated with customizable graphics, maps and crawls, as well as automatic delivery of targeted storm warning and alerts.

Cloud-based remote access allows broadcasters to manage alerts from anywhere with an internet connection, ensuring seamless coverage and uninterrupted severe weather alerting. Crawls and graphics can match a station’s current on-air look and dynamically adapt to changing weather conditions and urgency. Broadcasters can tailor trigger conditions, frequency, maps, graphics and text in an easy-to-use interface, as well as integrate rich graphical content already created within an existing Max account from The Weather Company.

Key capabilities and benefits for viewers include:

• Warnings displayed while watching other shows: Flexible programming integration allows critical radar maps, customized alert crawls and live county-by-county warning graphics to be overlaid onto regular broadcasts without disrupting live shows, and across OTT, web, mobile and social channels.
• Hyperlocal, customized alerts: High-resolution live radar maps give a 3D view of storms and tropical threats with neighborhood-level precision to help viewers best prepare for severe weather.
• Quick and engaging weather notifications: Direct integration with National Weather Service data triggers automatic weather watches and warnings to scroll across the bottom of the screen, with added details or images if desired.
• One-stop shop for weather and non-weather alerts: Beyond weather notifications, viewers can also see alerts on school closings from BTi. Max Alert Live also provides the ability for manual alerting to share sports scores, news headlines and more coming soon.

“As extreme weather grows more intense and impactful, it’s critical that broadcasters have the most powerful technology to help keep their communities safe and informed,” said Bill Dow, head of enterprise product from The Weather Company. “Combining the nation’s most robust radar data and severe weather alerting with high-resolution graphics and remote cloud capabilities, Max Alert Live is revolutionizing how innovative broadcasters like WKRC and those across Sinclair’s station group communicate urgent weather information to their communities.”

Learn more about WKRC’s use case with Max Alert Live.

Max Alert Live is commercially available today as part of The Weather Company’s Max suite of solutions urpose-built for media companies. For more information, visit weathercompany.com.

About The Weather Company
The Weather Company helps people and businesses around the world make more informed decisions and take action in the face of weather. With its deep industry expertise and highly accurate, high-volume weather data combined with advanced technology and AI, The Weather Company provides insights and solutions that harness the power of weather in a scalable, privacy-forward way. The world’s most accurate forecaster, the company serves hundreds of enterprise customers across media, advertising, aviation and more, and is trusted by hundreds of millions of monthly active users via digital properties from The Weather Channel (weather.com) and Weather Underground (wunderground.com). For more, visit weathercompany.com.