The Weather Network TV App

Review by eFreeware

Local television news rarely gives you the weather at the moment you want it. You sit through the rest of the bulletin for a forecast that may not even match the conditions a mile down the road. The Weather Network TV App is built to remove that wait: it is an Android TV app from The Weather Network & MétéoMédia that puts forecast information and weather video on demand, reachable with the remote rather than a phone.

The pitch has two halves. One is practical: current conditions, warnings and maps for the places you care about, without hunting through a broadcast schedule. The other is more like a streaming service, with a catalog of original weather video to watch at leisure. The app is free and ad-supported, there are no in-app purchases, and it carries an Everyone content rating, so nothing about the setup assumes a specialist audience.

It has been on Google Play since August 2015 and shows more than a million installs, with a 3.0 average across 2,683 ratings. That middle-of-the-road score tells me the app divides its users, and the most likely reason is that its best feature is not available to everyone. I will come back to that.

Forecasts down to a single mile

The headline capability is forecasting at a very local scale. The developer says the app resolves conditions to within one mile of where you live, which is a much finer grain than the regional outlooks you get from a typical broadcast bulletin. If you live somewhere where weather changes sharply over short distances, that difference is the reason to care about this app at all.

Forecast detail comes in three layers: hourly, a 36-hour outlook and a 14-day outlook. Those three views cover different questions. The hourly view is for deciding how to dress or when to move something outdoors; the 36-hour view covers the next day and a half; the 14-day view is for planning further ahead, with the usual caveat that long-range forecasts are the least certain part of any weather service.

Warnings and alerts are localized too, tied to the places you follow rather than a broad region. For a household in an area prone to storms, heat or winter weather, that is the part of the app with the clearest practical value: a warning that names your area is more useful than one that covers a whole state or province.

Maps, saved locations and voice search

Alongside the forecast numbers, the app includes weather maps, radar and traffic flow maps, all with pan and zoom. Radar is the view I would expect people to open most often when a storm is approaching, since it shows where precipitation is and which way it is moving. Traffic flow is a different kind of information, but it sits naturally next to a forecast when you are deciding when to leave.

You can also save multiple locations as favorites, which is what makes the localized approach workable for more than one place. A household with family in two cities, or someone who splits time between a home and a cabin, can keep both on hand instead of re-entering a location each time. The app supports six languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Italian and Portuguese.

You can also speak weather terms, videos and photos, not just place names. On a television, that matters more than it does on a phone, because typing with a remote is tedious. Speaking a place name or a weather term is a faster route to what you want, and it also gives you a way into the video library without scrolling through rows of thumbnails.

The video library and the live channel

The second half of the app is its on-demand video. The developer describes a large library of original content, running to hundreds of hours, available to watch for free. This is where the app behaves less like a utility and more like a streaming channel: you can lean back and watch weather stories and related footage rather than checking a forecast and closing the app.

The live channel is the exception, and it is the catch. Signing in with a cable account unlocks regional storm coverage and weather stories. That is a genuinely different product from the on-demand library, and it is the feature most likely to explain the app's mixed reception. If you do not have a cable subscription, the live channel is simply not part of what you get, however good the rest of the app is.

Both the live channel and the interactive side are localized, so the experience is meant to follow your region rather than present one national feed. That is consistent with the rest of the app, and it is the thread that ties the forecast, the alerts, the maps and the video together.

What the app asks of you

The app is free to install and free to use, with advertising as the trade-off and no in-app purchases to consider. You are not being asked to weigh a subscription against a free tier, and there is no paid upgrade to wonder about.

The real requirement is hardware and setup rather than money. This is an Android TV app, so it needs a television or streaming device running that platform and a remote to drive it. It also needs your location to do the thing it is best at: forecasts resolved to within a mile, localized alerts and region-specific video all depend on knowing where you are. The more locations you save, the more of the app's value you draw on.

The other requirement is the cable subscription, if you want the live channel. That is the one part of the app with a condition attached, and it is worth being clear about before you judge the app on its live coverage.

How I would use it in a household

The natural pattern is a shared screen. The app is not something you glance at for ten seconds the way you might check a phone; it is built for a television, where a forecast can be read from across the room and a radar loop can be watched by more than one person at once. That makes it a reasonable fit for a household making a joint decision about the day, whether that is a drive, an outdoor event or simply whether to bring in the patio furniture.

I would set up the saved locations first, since almost everything else in the app keys off them: the warnings, the localized forecast and the regional video. Traffic flow maps are a separate errand, best checked before leaving rather than during.

Voice search is worth trying early if you find remote navigation slow. Speaking a location or a weather term skips a lot of directional-button pressing, and it is the fastest way into the video side of the app. Recent updates list bug fixes and performance improvements, so the app is still being maintained.

A forecast app for the living room, with one condition

The Weather Network TV App is a sensible fit for a household that wants weather on the television rather than the phone: hyper-local forecasts, alerts tied to saved places, radar and traffic maps, and a free on-demand video library, all driven by a remote. The six supported languages widen that audience, and the absence of in-app purchases keeps the decision simple.

The condition is the live channel, which the developer reserves for cable subscribers. If you have that subscription, the app offers both the interactive forecast side and regional live coverage in one place. If you do not, you are still getting the forecast, the maps, the alerts and the video library, and the live channel is not part of the deal.

It suggests an app that works for some households and disappoints others, and the split between what is free and what requires a cable subscription is the most obvious line along which that could happen. For a cord-cutting household that mainly wants a big-screen forecast and radar, the app's core features are the ones that matter most, and they are not behind that condition.

What's new in version 4.4.5

Bug fixes and performance improvements