• by Newswire Report , August 18, 2003

The Weather Channel is making it very clear the company is committed to being available to consumers anytime, anywhere. On Monday, the company announced the launch of Desktop Weather Platinum, a customizable product that offers access to timely weather details, including the current temperature for any location, all in the user's system tray. Subscribers can keep a close eye on changing temperatures without having to touch a button and can launch this highly personalized application with one easy click.

"Desktop Weather Platinum will forever change the way that people look at the weather," said Joe Fiveash, senior vice-president for product and business development for weather.com. "The highly personalized nature of this application will emphasize the daily and sometimes profound impact that the weather can have on people's lives. Our consumers routinely tell us that The Weather Channel is their favorite place to obtain weather information. Knowing this, we want to ensure that they always have convenient access across any and all platforms."

Users will have the ability to customize Desktop Weather Platinum to suit their individual needs, including adjusting the size and shape of the application. For example, subscribers can shrink the application to fit the right side or top of their screen. This small toolbar design allows scrolling weather alerts, current conditions and an extended forecast to remain visible at all times. The product also offers several seasonal and weather-related background options from which users can select.

Desktop Weather Platinum also includes a new personalized radar feature that is updated every five minutes and allows users to center the maps on their selected location and plot additional locations to see if approaching storms will impact them. Users can also zoom in and out of the radar maps and create an animation of the weather's movement. In addition, Desktop Weather Platinum provides a scrolling severe weather alert feature, which is presented in a manner similar to that of the cable network. Users can determine how often they want to view these alerts and also have the option to have a thunderclap sound accompany each warning. Leveraging additional resources from The Weather Channelcable network, the new application delivers 75 local and nine regional video forecasts as well as an extensive collection of maps, from which users can create a list of their favorites.

Subscribers can also set their favorite locations and can now easily switch between cities.

For the selected city, the application delivers current conditions, 5-day and 10-day forecasts, hour-by-hour forecasts and averages and records for 80,000 locations worldwide in addition to features such as "Feels like" temperature, sunrise and sunset information, chance of precipitation, visibility, UV Index, dew point and more.

Desktop Weather Platinum is available, for an annual subscription fee of $29.99, by registering at www.weather.com/services . New subscribers will receive a seven-day free trial.