The Weather Channel has decided to pull the plug on its automated weather display, a favorite experience for weather geeks everywhere. However, it wasn’t the original weather nerd TV station. Early cable TV networks had their own low-tech versions of this much longer ago than you might expect. For example, check out the video below which shows one of these weather stations back in 1975.
The audio was from a local FM station and you can enjoy handwritten public service announcements, as well.
Vendors
We always wondered exactly what the hardware for all this looked like. You could guess that some guy wasn’t panning the camera back and forth. Of course, the Internet knows all, so it didn’t take long to uncover several commercial units made for this service. We saw press releases dating back to at least 1964 and it looks like 1967 was when the devices became very mainstream.
A major supplier of this kind of “local origination” equipment was Telemation and [T. Buckingham Thomas] has a good recollection of it being in operation and how it led to him being the program director of a mid-sized cable TV company. There were a few different units that were pretty pricey, especially for those days. There were several competitors vying for this market. Texas Electronics still makes weather stations, but probably not with automated cameras anymore. Telemation, on the other hand, got sold a few times and somewhat lives on as a part o ..
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