The Weather Channel

Contact:  
The Weather Channel
300 Interstate North Parkway
Atlanta, GA 30339
+1-770-226 0000
www.weather.com

Tools Used:
Red Hat 6.2 Linux, MICO, CORBA, Python

Description:
The Weather Channel is a leading source of weather expertise with a staff of more than 100 meteorologists, 24-hour tracking, state-of-the-art systems for speed and accuracy and an in-depth analysis of weather conditions, reaching over 76 million homes, and 6.8 million in Latin America. In addition, The Weather Channel offers weather information in a variety of ways including www.weather.com, through The Weather Channel Radio Network, and on newspaper weather pages. 

Problem:
The Weather Channel (TWC) aggregates data from multiple sources at the Atlanta headquarters of TWC and transmits it via satellite link to thousands of cable head-ends. More than 70 million television sets can view a local weather segment tailored to their specific geographic region.  TWC wanted a system that would provide reliability, not require a high level of operational support and offer the ability to have detailed data logging.

Solution:
The developers at TWC selected the open source Red Hat 6.2 Linux operating system because of its proven reliability (www.redhat.com). Another open source package called MICO was used inside the new system to provide middleware services. MICO is a fully compliant and freely available implementation of CORBA 2.0. A third open source package called Python is widely used throughout the system to provide a flexible means of configuring and monitoring the system. Python is an open source scripting language that can be easily embedded into C and C++ programs. In three months of continuous 24x7 operation, the system has encountered no problems from any of the open source software packages.

Each cable head-end has been equipped with a video-rendering computer to produce the familiar "Local" weather segment. All local data, including forecasts, current conditions, warnings, watches, advisories and radar images are transmitted via this system. Additionally, within a few months, this new system will also be rolled out as an upgrade to TWC language-specific broadcasts in Central and South America.

"CORBA provides a way of physically implementing a system that closely follows its logical design, reducing development time and maintenance cost," says Brian Shield, executive vice president and CIO, TWC.

"As one of the most automated TV production studios in the world, TWC was challenged with developing some rather unique interfaces. Red Hat Linux is not only rock-solid, but is designed to make custom device drivers easy to write. A device driver to handle one of these interfaces was written in house in less than a week. Another custom interface uses a driver that was readily produced by an outside company. In both cases, having open source code allowed the drivers to be written without consulting the operating system vendor," said Shield, and added, "Both MICO and Red Hat Linux have proven to be production grade. We'll be deploying them even more widely in the future."

The new consolidated system replaces several Unix and NT/Microsoft computers with a single Linux machine, improving reliability and reducing operational support. Detailed logging allows the Meteorology Department to monitor the timeliness of every individual data product for thousands of locations. The software development time required to create new localized products has been slashed from months to weeks, with more improvement on the way.