• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, July 20, 2021

New streaming, digital and other media efforts around weather content are rising. Some believe it’s all about the word "trust"-- and the ability to use it for various business extensions.

Some surveys show consumers putting more faith in specific TV content, giving a “trust” patina to those platforms -- including the weather.

Surely, predicting weather content has gotten far better, due to improved data models, access to quick historical and predicative information, and digital technologies.

Fox Corp. will get into the game, launching Fox Weather later this year. In 2018, Byron Allen’s Entertainment Studios acquired the Weather Channel for $300 million, touting polls ranking the Weather Channel the most “trusted” name in news media. Now it is expanding efforts around weather content.

Much of this "trust" may come with the way consumers now exist in the digital media world. At the turn of the last century -- around the year 2000 -- consumers were like young kids full of optimism, in a state of complete delight with digital content.

Twenty-one years later, everyone knows better. Misinformation, questions over news content, hacking, fraud, theft of personal and financial data has put consumers on high alert.

The belief by some news platform is now “safety” is major issue -- not just for advertisers, but consumers increasingly dependent on the internet for all their day-to-day living needs.

The thinking goes, consumers will fall back on media -- traditional TV networks and other platforms -- they can count on. And, there is the whole "climate change" factor amplifying this kind of news.

Major flooding in Germany and Belgium -- something rarely seen in those countries -- has been one major news story. Plus, Western U.S. states are not only seeing bigger fires, but possible water shortages, too. All this follows a bad winter in Texas, which resulted in frozen pipes, and the state’s electrical grid coming to a halt.

This would have been unheard of news just few years ago.

All that has cause consumers to lean into weather content -- more than ever before, attached to the always controversial topic, for some denies, of climate change.

Now the Fox name -- and the Fox news brand -- will attaches itself to weather. Will weather be used to promote a wider TV content agenda?

We believe most weather news exists with little opinionated associations. Hope for sunshine, but worry about the rain.

Or, maybe as Bob Dylan use to sing: "You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."