News Releases

LAS VEGAS, April 24, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- NAB Show -  The Weather Company, an IBM Business (NYSE: IBM), is introducing major enhancements to its Max Engage solution for news stations, which will now include the power of IBM Watson, a cognitive digital solution for news stations. Using Watson technology, weathercasters will be able to find the information they need through natural language queries. Updates to the Max Engage system include the ability to automatically detect weather and traffic events, create personalized content and video about those events, and intelligently deliver that content to the right audience, in the right place, at the right time. As a result, broadcasters will be empowered to seamlessly deliver personalized digital content for its audiences with higher frequency – without burdening news station staff.

"We have made tremendous advances in Max Engage's ability to automatically create and deliver individualized content and videos for weather and traffic-related events," said Bill Dow, Executive - Media Solutions, The Weather Company. "With these new enhancements, newscasters can produce up to 10 times more content than they do today. Through targeted distribution, stations can share this content through alerts only to those users in the part of the DMA that will be affected, such as when traffic on a key highway route slows below normal or when high temps will exceed 90 degrees in a specific location."

Max Engage with Watson can have a meaningful impact on newsroom staffing by radically accelerating the manual, time-consuming process of curating a menu of relevant, timely subject matter across digital properties.

Content Creation and Delivery with Max Engage

• Content Curation: Using intelligent, content curation, the Max Engage system uses relevant weather information it discovers to produce fun, animated, silent videos with as much or as little human intervention desired. The feature will automatically serve end-users with unique, updated videos multiple times a day.
• Geo-Fencing: The weather video forecasts will be pushed to consumers through mobile, social, and web at the same time. For mobile, through automated geo-fencing technology, the content of each video will be truly individualized based on a user's location down to street level.

Enhanced Storytelling using IBM Watson

• Enhanced Storytelling: Max Engage with Watson increases audience engagement with the content itself by using the Watson Natural Language Understanding API to service relevant content, such as weather history and current conditions, to enhance storytelling. In future updates, Watson will also help mine unstructured data from the Internet of Things or other data sources to highlight impacts to consumers such as street flooding and down power lines. The Weather Company will be teaching Watson to answer personal questions via voice or text that will empower consumers to make better decisions throughout their day, such as "Will I need a jacket today?" or "When is the best time to start gardening?"

Social Streaming

• Interactive Social Streaming: Max Engage with Watson will allow broadcasters to stream to social platforms directly from their familiar Max interface. This seamless integration will allow the broadcaster to see the audience comments in real time while streaming so they can see the most frequently asked questions for them to answer, keeping the audience engaged and the conversation relevant.

NAB attendees will have the opportunity to learn more about Max Engage with Watson as well as The Weather Company's other cognitive solutions at booth SL4711. Hourly presentations will demonstrate how The Weather Company enables the newsroom of the future with 24/7 production of content to meet consumer demands and a combination of location and weather data for targeting and effective monetization. The booth will have both a physical and a virtual set to show how augmented reality technology can be added to an existing set and the transition to a virtual environment using Max Reality. See how The Weather Company is uniquely positioned to help broadcasters become more essential to their audience and advertisers in this changing world.

For more information, visit business.weather.com/industry-solutions/media.

The Weather Company, an IBM Business
The Weather Company, an IBM Business, helps people make informed decisions – and take action – in the face of weather. The company offers the most accurate, personalized and actionable weather data and insights to millions of consumers, as well as thousands of marketers and businesses via Weather's API, its business solutions division, and its own digital products from The Weather Channel (weather.com) and Weather Underground (wunderground.com).

The company delivers tens of billions of forecasts daily. Its products include a top weather app on all major mobile platforms globally, a network of 250,000 personal weather stations, a top-20 U.S. website, one of the world's largest IoT data platforms, and industry-leading business solutions.

Weather Means Business™. The world's biggest brands in aviation, energy, insurance, media and government rely on The Weather Company for data, technology platforms and services to help improve decision-making and respond to weather's impact on business. For more, visit theweathercompany.com.

Twitter handles & hashtags: @IBM, @weathercompany

SOURCE The Weather Company, an IBM Business