The News: IBM’s The Weather Company is adding deep new video storytelling capabilities to its diverse The Weather Company Max platform, giving local and regional broadcasters the ability to quickly create high-quality, customized and real-time digital weather stories and updates that can be brought straight to viewers. The new Max Velocity features are available now, while an additional new Max Alert Live feature will launch in June to enable broadcasters to quickly issue on-air notifications of disruptive weather events. Read the full press release from IBM here.

IBM’s The Weather Company Max Platform Gains Rich Video Storytelling Tools and On-Air Severe Weather Alerts to Bolster Broadcast Weather Coverage

Analyst Take: The Weather Company’s new Max platform broadcasting capabilities are exciting — both for consumers and businesses.

The new browser-based video weather storytelling tool from IBM’s The Weather Company, is called Max Velocity, and combines template-based video creation with weather data, interactive mapping, and streamlined person-to-person interviews. This will allow broadcasters to create unique videos and then publish them from a remote live shot, a studio, or from any location with an internet connection. The new capabilities are built on top of IBM’s The Weather Company Max Cloud hybrid cloud platform.

What makes IBM’s The Weather Company’s latest video storytelling features even more useful for weather watchers is that they continue to build on the existing and broad The Weather Company Max platform, further expanding its wide-ranging capabilities for broadcasters who are always looking to find new ways to share critical weather information with viewers.

IBM, which bought The Weather Company in 2016, certainly understands these societal meteorological needs, and can add in other IBM technologies, including IBM Cloud, to assemble and deliver such services from A-Z without starting from scratch. That is a huge benefit when you are a giant, technology-laden global company that possesses a slew of technology platforms, and it’s great to see IBM strategically taking advantage of those synergies.

I believe this is a critical benefit for broadcasters – to be able secure the core IBM’s The Weather Company technology while also bringing in the proven IBM hybrid cloud infrastructure to make it all work together.

The Deets on The Weather Company’s Max Alert Live Capabilities

The new Max Alert Live disruptive weather alert capabilities will arrive in late June to add more capabilities to the Max platform, designed to keep audiences informed about severe weather events around them. Max Alert Live will use the familiar Max platform user interface in combination with cloud-based technology that can be managed from anywhere via an internet connection. Max Alert Live will integrate data from the National Weather Service and will have the ability to automatically trigger weather alert messages that scroll across the bottom of a viewer’s screen.

In my view, IBM is wisely bringing these pieces together to offer these new Max Velocity video weather storytelling and disruptive weather alert capabilities to media companies and local broadcasters who are hungry to find new tools that allow them to stand out from their competition in the marketplace.

And with climate change making major impacts on the weather affecting our communities, it is critical to continue to find new tools like these to monitor and report on dangerous weather conditions that threaten us all. IBM’s The Weather Company’s latest offering even builds in formal climate change content through a recent collaboration with Climate Central, which is a nonprofit news organization that offers independent climate-related content.

Disclosure: Futurum Research is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.

Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of Futurum Research as a whole.