Fox Weather simulcast tops Weather Channel in viewer ratings during Hurricane Ian
Fox Weather, the new weather news streaming service launched last year by the biggest player in cable news, notched its best performance in head-to-head competition with The Weather Channel during live coverage of Hurricane Ian last week.
On Sept. 28, as Hurricane Ian was making landfall along the Florida coastline, Fox Weather’s simulcast from 1 to 4 a.m. averaged 552,000 viewers, beating out The Weather Channel as well as its competitors on CNN and MSNBC during the same time frame.
Additionally, Fox Business Network’s simulcast of Fox Weather programming from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. surpassed AccuWeather with both overall viewers and those in the key advertising demographic of people age 25 to 54.
The network, which does not typically make data about its various streaming services public, said Fox Weather peaked as a top-25 free app in the app store during the storm and has been a top-five free app among all weather apps during coverage of Hurricane Ian.
Last year, Fox hired more than 100 staffers, including dozens of meteorologists, to its national weather team and invested a reported $10 million in the streaming weather news venture.
“I would be very disappointed if he [Rupert Murdoch] didn’t come into this space, because it is a very important space,” Byron Allen, The Weather Channel's owner and president, told The Hill at the time of Fox Weather's launch. “I think there’s more than enough room in this particular space … to have a number of players. What’s happening now is people are starting to connect the dots and understand what climate change and global warming really means.”
During the storm last week, the network said it had expanded distribution on Verizon Fios and Amazon Freevee so viewers in the Northeast with family members in Florida could keep up with coverage of the hurricane.
"Every facet of the team was prepared and it showed throughout all levels of coverage, components of which outdid competitors who have been on the air for 40 years" Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott wrote in an internal memo to employees on Monday.