4-page Case Study - Posted 9/15/2008
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Weather Company Cuts Costs, Wins New Customers with Mapping Solution
Weather Central provides solutions for creating custom, local, weather, traffic, news, and sports content to television broadcasters and Web sites for consumers around the world. As customer expectations increased, the company wanted to offer the latest features and find a more cost-effective way to keep its databases of mapping images current and high quality. Weather Central integrated Microsoft® Virtual Earth™ mapping technology with its existing solutions, and created high-resolution, three-dimensional graphics and animation. By adding the high-quality images in Virtual Earth as a layer in its solutions, the company saves the cost of maintaining image databases and produces localized products quicker. It has created new offerings, such as reportSTORMS.com (scheduled to go live in September 2008), a site where consumers can submit their own weather videos and pictures.
Situation
Weather Central was founded in 1974 by Terry Kelly, then a meteorologist for the University of Wisconsin's Space Science Center. The company creates weather, forecasting, traffic, and news and sports systems—such as the first computerized weather graphics system in the 1980s, called LiveLine—for over 400 broadcasters worldwide. Today, the company’s portfolio of solutions includes over 30 U.S. and international product, software, and technology patents.
Complex Data and Image Integration
Weather Central creates turnkey hardware and software systems for broadcasters and delivers the associated weather data to provide localized graphics in real time, with a value-added approach for consumers. For example, the company’s forecast model generates hourly, daily, and weekly forecast and visual weather information that is geo-located, or superimposed on maps. People around the world can use this information to plan their everyday activities—whether they get the information from television, newspapers, a wireless device, or directly from Weather Central at MyWeather.com.
The company integrates many data sources to create solutions for consumers. “We work with more than just maps and images,” says Steve Smedberg, Vice President of Operations at Weather Central. “We incorporate wind speed and snow cover data, cones of probability of where a cyclone or hurricane might be headed, or animations to show how much rain has fallen in an area.” Weather Central gets meteorological information from public data sources worldwide, such as radar data, satellite images, and ground reporting, from its own proprietary forecast model and through partnerships with companies that aggregate data from weather sensors. To blend the data with mapping tools and custom image data, Weather Central organizes and checks the data before retransmitting it to customers. The mapping department color-matches and assembles maps from a particular region—either the customer's designated market area (DMA), or a locality outside it—to help customers cover a news or weather story. In the past, it then ran mapping processes—which could take several hours—to enable its image databases to work with its software.
Need for Affordable, Easily Updatable Imagery
Weather Central developed large databases of its own map tiles customized to match individual broadcasters’ visual branding—each tile represents a particular view of a rectangular piece of information. The company bought data sets from partners to incorporate into its image databases, but had to purchase updates frequently and process and customize the new images to keep the data current. As the market began to expect the ability to zoom in even closer and see more detail, the company had to buy higher-resolution data sets. Victor Marsh, Chief Technical Officer at Weather Central and MyWeather.com, says, “The data sets would get outdated the minute we purchased them, and so would the customized maps that we created using them. To stay current, we were spending lots of money on mapping and passing those costs to the customer—it was very expensive.”
Smedberg adds, “The detail in the map photographs was there, but it could have been better. Users could zoom down to see a car parked outside a house, but they couldn’t tell what kind of a car it was.”
Weather Central color-matches its aerial photographs to provide seamless imagery for animations or zoom views. This is an expensive process, and its customers could often only afford to purchase imagery for their DMAs, which limited their reporting ability. Around 2001, broadcasters began to demand affordable weather technologies and visuals to cover non-local stories, such as global events, and to focus frequently on multiple locations—for example, the Midwestern states have large populations of people who live half the year in Arizona or Florida. Weather Central needed a less-expensive way to cover more areas for a single customer.
Solution Must Fit Television, Internet, and Wireless Consumer Markets
To meet the needs of both television and Internet markets, Weather Central provided broadcasters a tool that allowed them to render their video images from television in a different size and compression, suitable for playing on the Web. However, online and wireless-device consumers wanted the ability to control map views—to look at different angles, zoom in or out, and so on. Ben Zimmerman, Director of On-Demand Services at Weather Central, says, “Online users want their own experience at their own pace and convenience. But broadcasters have set show times, and they have to offer stories with local relevance and good graphical content. We needed technology that was flexible enough to serve both types of users.”
Weather Central bought its mapping technology from a vendor that works with military and industrial organizations, whose products were not focused on the consumer market. The vendor purchased TerraMetrics mapping technology from a third party, but its data sets were two-dimensional photographs—and sometimes painted imagery. This did not meet the company’s growing need for easily updatable, high-resolution images, especially for three-dimensional (3-D) animation, which is very consumer-friendly. Smedberg says, “Not everybody is good at understanding two-dimensional maps, but 3-D shows you what the weather is going to look like in your area, as if you were actually in that environment. Also, our forecast model depends on capturing the dynamics of how weather moves up and down through the atmosphere, in addition to over the land—for example, we want to show snow levels over the next few weeks to people who are planning a skiing trip. And that means 3-D.”
To improve the quality of its products, Weather Central sought a more affordable solution that could reduce time-to-market for solutions and support a deeper use of images, such as 3-D and animation, for future innovations. It wanted a solution that was easy to update, use, and integrate into its complex solution-creation process, and gave top priority to high-quality images suitable for television, the Internet, and wireless devices. It also wanted a strong and long-term relationship with a vendor that supplied its own images.
Solution
In early 2007, Weather Central considered both Google Earth and Microsoft® Virtual Earth™ mapping technology. After testing each one and meeting with representatives from both companies, the company chose Virtual Earth.
Choosing a Solution
Weather Central preferred the color-matching and image quality in Virtual Earth, which it felt had a look and feel that would work better on television. “Though the images were necessarily shot in different seasons and light and cloud-cover conditions,” says Zimmerman, “Virtual Earth made the transitions among images, especially at the 15-meter and below range, really smooth. With Google Earth, you get a lot of color shifts.”
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We reduced our costs of keeping pace with mapping. Microsoft gets the most up-to-date, high-resolution images and provides us a mechanism with which to leverage them. No other company came close. |
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Victor Marsh
Chief Technical Officer, Weather Central |
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Microsoft Virtual Earth provides tools to integrate its imagery and other features into Weather Central’s existing map animation rendering system—unlike Google Earth, which has no such integration tools. Weather Central can use this functionality to integrate its 3D:LIVE product with Virtual Earth 3D to create 3-D and animated virtual tours of cities or other landmarks to show the effects of weather—either over time or as it happens. Virtual Earth 3D provides a three-dimensional online experience to search, browse, and explore the world. This technology compiles photographic images of cities and terrain to generate textured, realistic 3-D models. With Virtual Earth, Weather Central can bring together satellite images, road maps, and terrain information to deliver a comprehensive, aerial view of the globe that users can navigate by clicking and dragging, or by using the search box. It can also include search boxes on its maps for finding businesses, people, places, or collections (a collection is a group of map items or search results that users create and save online). Using collections and Virtual Earth 3D, television producers who use Weather Central’s solutions can more quickly create maps to illustrate news stories.
Weather Central determined that Microsoft would provide the best product and technical support—an important factor that influenced the decision. Bill Baker, President of Weather Central, says, “Microsoft’s approach is to build a long-term, sustainable business plan around mapping technologies, like search and Web services, and to build them all into Virtual Earth, instead of just delivering an application, like Google does.”
How the Company Uses Virtual Earth
In May 2007, Weather Central started integrating Virtual Earth into its solutions, and by mid-June it was beta testing new applications. In most cases, Weather Central now only color-matches custom imagery inside each customer’s local DMA, and uses Virtual Earth imagery to cover terrain outside it, though some customers use only Virtual Earth imagery for both purposes. Thus, instead of creating and maintaining large custom image databases for customers, the company now aggregates small, localized mapping packages and adds a layer from Virtual Earth into its solutions to provide global images. Using the Virtual Earth application programming interface, Weather Central blends its various data feeds and map databases with Virtual Earth image tiles, transitioning to Virtual Earth at certain resolution thresholds and elevations.
For television, broadcasters can use Weather Central’s MagicTRAK technology to touch a point on a map to bring up high-resolution map imagery from Virtual Earth or live video (from the company’s meteorological data sources) of severe weather in any part of the world. For the Web and wireless devices, Weather Central is beta testing a site called reportSTORMS.com by integrating Virtual Earth with interactive radar to give consumers broadcast-quality content on demand. Users will be able to check the severity of storms on a map, look at their projected trajectories, and get estimates as to when they might reach users’ neighborhoods.
Benefits
Weather Central chose Virtual Earth for its high-quality images, ease of integration, and support for technological innovation. The company plans to grow its business with new offerings such as the interactive reportSTORMS.com, where consumers will be able to upload their own weather content. It has strong technical support and saves time and money by using the images in Virtual Earth.
High Image Quality
Broadcasters expect the highest-quality images, and Weather Central is pleased with Virtual Earth. “In the broadcast realm, images have to look great. That is why Virtual Earth is superior to its competitors—because of the visual quality of the mapping,” says Zimmerman. The high image quality also saves Weather Central from doing the extra processing work on painted or poorly color-matched imagery.
Marsh agrees that Virtual Earth imagery meets high standards: “Google tends to look more like a patchwork quilt, all squares and rectangles. It is not as graphically pleasing to the eye.” He also appreciates the bird’s eye view, which he likens to having his own virtual helicopter hovering over the buildings: “Instead of just looking straight down on a map, you can view buildings along the city skyline.”
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Using Virtual Earth to combine real-time radar with storm tracking can protect people’s lives, potentially even call their cell phones to warn them if they are in danger. |
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Ben Zimmerman
Director of
On-Demand Services, Weather Central |
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Baker adds, “With Virtual Earth 3D, you can zoom in on your house and see your dog in the back yard—that’s impressive.”
Easy Integration and Use
The company expects its business to grow with Virtual Earth, thanks to its ease of use and integration into the existing Weather Central product line. Baker says, “Microsoft Virtual Earth brought our organization a quick time to market for our new software applications—integration with our products and processes was very easy.”
Weather Central’s customers can use the software exactly how they have in the past except that they now experience seamless mapping imagery to tell relevant local stories—and, using Virtual Earth 3D and collections, television producers can produce in less than a minute maps that had previously taken up to a half hour to produce. Says Zimmerman, “On our end, development with Virtual Earth is quick and simple.”
Support for Innovation
Weather Central is creating new offerings and features based on Virtual Earth. And its use of Virtual Earth at the 2008 National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas impressed customers and attracted new customers. Of the company’s virtual 3-D tour of Las Vegas, Zimmerman says, “I put together some weather information overlays with some clouds in the background, even a 3D model of the nearby Bellagio hotel. When we played it, people stopped to say, ‘What is that—I’ve never seen that before!’ It led to some new business.”
Of the upcoming site reportSTORMS.com, Zimmerman says, “Using Virtual Earth to combine real-time radar with storm tracking can protect people’s lives, potentially even call their cell phones to warn them if they are in danger—all the infrastructure for that functionality is here. It could be one of the biggest draws on the Internet.”
Weather Central integrates Virtual Earth with its own 3D:LIVE products to create on-demand, high-resolution imagery and live video that works well on television. Baker says, “After Hurricane Katrina, everyone wanted to see where the dikes and levees were broken and how the weather was going to affect them. We used Virtual Earth to show them just that. Newscasters could pull up maps of areas pre-Katrina with Virtual Earth and draw on top of those maps using our NewsNAVIGATOR product to show viewers the areas of risk and where the flooding occurred.”
Solid Technology Support
Weather Central finds Microsoft easy to work with. “Whenever I have needed something, the Microsoft team has responded. They’re very accessible,” Zimmerman says.
Baker agrees, and adds, “Microsoft is helping Weather Central integrate the value-added weather data that affects how consumers live, work, and play,” he says. “Partnering with Microsoft sends a message that we are working with a leader.”
Saved Time and Money
Weather Central no longer worries about its data sets getting old too fast—or being too expensive and time-consuming to maintain efficiently. “We reduced our costs of keeping pace with mapping,” says Marsh. “Microsoft gets the most up-to–date, high-resolution images and provides us a mechanism with which to leverage them. No other company came close to offering us that. I can then pass that savings on to my customers.”
Weather Central no longer has to assemble and color-match maps each time a customer wants to cover an event or location outside its region. “Virtual Earth certainly saved us time and money,” says Zimmerman. “Now, customers can get the images they need instantly. We don’t have to run hours of mapping processes to get the databases to work with the software. And if I have a customer who is interested in seeing some of our solutions, I don’t have to create or process maps to mail over to them. I can customize tiles in Virtual Earth in under an hour and send the result through e-mail.”
“Before,” Smedberg adds, “if customers wanted a map set that covered the world, they would have to make a huge investment in hardware and mapping processes, and then might not use most of the images. They had to wait while we prepared the images for stories outside their area. Now, they can get global images as soon as a story breaks. Our customers work on a 24-hour daily news cycle; they have to be able to respond quickly.”
Marsh is confident that Weather Central made the right choice. “When we first started showing customers what we could do, they’d say, ‘Can you put Google Earth maps into that too?’” he says. “We don’t hear that anymore.”
Microsoft Virtual Earth
The Microsoft Virtual Earth platform is an integrated set of services providing quality geospatial data, rich imagery, cutting edge technology, and dependable performance that helps organizations visualize data and provide immersive end-user experiences. With ongoing investments in innovation driven by customer feedback, the Virtual Earth platform continues to offer new map detail and imagery, feature enhancements, and robust platform capabilities.
For more information, visit:
www.microsoft.com/virtualearth
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com
For more information about Weather Central products and services, call (608) 274-5789 or visit the Web site at:
www.wxc.com
