• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, October 8, 2008

NBC is turning off one of the most highly recognized multicast local digital networks, NBC Weather Plus.

The network now says there isn't money to be made here. And so the four-year-old brand will go away, and 10 NBC-owned stations and 80 affiliates will be looking for other products to fill their local digital channels.

Reading the lines -- and between the lines - it's all about advertising, and the lack of it. NBC had better distribution versus other new local digital networks. But even in this brave new world of digital TV, it wasn't enough. As traditional TV syndication programmers know too well, when you don't have enough distribution, you can't get many national advertisers.

New local digital network executives talk up the growing power of direct response TV advertisers, as well as new, smaller TV advertisers who might not be able to afford a media schedule on traditional TV stations.

But NBC must have seen a different picture. One wonders whether NBC might have had same problems The Weather Channel initially had in selling national TV advertisers a couple of decades ago, as a network that viewers need only in short intervals of 10 or 15 minutes.

Other multicast local TV digital networks may have a better shot because they have longer-form content -- movies, dramas, comedies and the like.  Still, in the new digital world, where YouTube is a poster child, one would have thought any length video can work with any level of viewer distribution.

Of course all of this was complicated -- or perhaps simplified -- when NBC bought a minority interest in the long-time national cable network, The Weather Channel, back in July.

Station executives believe The Weather Channel wants its own local TV distribution. Not necessarily.  Steve Capus, president of NBC News, which had oversight on the business said, as quoted in TV Week : "Even if the Weather Channel acquisition hadn't happened, this was a business that was challenged. We were going to have to face that at some point."

So video on the traditional TV box, whether digital or analog, still needs to look like TV. That's what viewers and TV business executives expect

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