Attendees of this year's National Association of
Broadcasters conference in April will be able to visit Weather Central's booth
to see which way the winds are blowing for 3D technologies in the newsroom.
The Madison, Wisc.-based company at the Las
Vegas confab (set for April 10 to 15) will demonstrate
a 3D stereoscopic weather system. While it has no immediate plans to release 3D
versions of its weather products, Weather Central decided to use the NAB
to show broadcasters and clients that its technology will be able to handle 3D
signals, noted senior vice president Steve Smedberg.
"The conversations we are having with customers right now
are very much like the conversations we had with high-definition in 2005 and
2006," Smedberg said. "The broadcasters are telling us that they are looking at
3D with great interest and with great caution. If they make an investment today
that will be on their books for five or seven years, they want to make certain
that it has the bandwidth and the headroom to accommodate 3D if the market
drives them in that direction."
While many questions remain about the consumer demand for 3D
content and the cost of upgrading existing infrastructure to handle such
signals, "the good news from our end is that the 3D demo we'll have at NAB
is built off our existing products," said Smedberg. "It is kind of a special
version of the code that is running on the same hardware that is commercially
available."
Also at NAB, Weather
Central will launch an upgraded version of 3D:LIVE that can produce more HD
weather graphics in real time. "You will now be able to show real-time map animations
that don't have to be rendered ahead of time and [3D:LIVE] can launch live
video from our systems," Smedberg said.
The company is also introducing a new set of social-networking
tools that make it easier for meteorologists to deliver information to their
audiences via Twitter and Facebook.
"We did a survey of users at television stations and we
found that a good portion of their day was spent programming other channels,
namely social media channels like Facebook, and Twitter, the company's Web site
and maybe a meteorologist's blog with weather information," Smedberg said. "These
new tools will make it easier to programming all the other screens and get
content to all the social media sites."
While high-definition upgrades slowed during the
severe recession of 2009, Smedberg noted there's been an uptick in interest for
HD technologies in the run-up to NAB.
"Weather drives a lot of the overall newscast ratings, so if you use [weather
technologies] as a leading indicator of where HD conversations in the newsroom
are going we are definitely seeing an uptick this year," Smedberg said.
"Generally speaking, we are hearing from the stations that there are budgets
for HD upgrades this year as opposed to 2009, when it was pretty much batten
down the hatches and people were trying to get along with what they had."
