WeatherStar

WeatherStar (sometimes rendered Weather Star or WeatherSTAR; "STAR" being an acronym for Satellite Transponder Addressable Receiver) is the technology used by American cable and satellite television network The Weather Channel (TWC) to generate its local forecast segments—branded as Local on the 8s (LOT8s) since 2002 and previously from 1996 to 1998—on cable and IPTV systems nationwide. The hardware takes the form of a computerized unit installed at a cable system's headend. It receives, generates, and inserts local forecasts and other weather information, including weather advisories and warnings, into TWC's national programming.

Overview

The primary purpose of WeatherStar units is to disseminate weather information for local forecast segments on The Weather Channel. The forecast and observation data – which is compiled from local offices of the National Weather Service (NWS), the Storm Prediction Center (SPC), and The Weather Channel (which began producing in-house forecasts in 2002, replacing the NWS-sourced zone forecasts that were utilized for the STAR's descriptive, regional and extended forecast products) – is received from the vertical blanking interval of the TWC video feed and from data transmitted via satellite; the localized data is then sent to the unit that inserts the data and accompanying programmed graphics over the TWC feed.

The WeatherStar systems are typically programmed to cue the local forecast segments and Lower Display Line (LDL) at given times. The units are programmed to feature customized segments known as "flavors", pre-determined segment lengths for each local forecast segment, varying by the time of broadcast, accommodating the inclusion or exclusion of certain products from a segment's product list. (Until the Local on the 8s segments adopted a uniform length, the extended forecast was the only product regularly included in each flavor.) Flavor lengths previously varied commonly between 30 seconds and two minutes, with some running as long as six minutes during the late 1980s and the mid-1990s; in April 2013, the LOT8s segment flavor switched permanently to a uniform one-minute length.

Outside of the regularly scheduled full-screen graphical segments, weather data is also inserted over the channel's national feed via the Lower Display Line; the LDL was originally displayed as a text-only overlay over the bottom third of the video feed on older STAR units up to the Weather Star Jr. model, containing no graphical background and only showing current weather observations and monthly precipitation totals for the chosen reporting station.