well if TWC is for sale here's my top choices to buy it out and my reasons of why.
Time Warner: why would they buy The Weather Channel, simple, to own another major network and merge it with the CNN brand, not to mention to keep the channel still based in Atlanta where both TWC and CNN is based at now.
Disney: why Disney, well, they own co-own ESPN and ABC News, and if possible wouldn't be surprise if The Weather Channel under Disney ownership, plus it will help ABC News wing itself off of it's existing deal with Accuweather to do their weather stories on shows like America This Morning, World News Now, Good Morning America and ABC World News Tonight.
CBS: well, they would love to turn their recent partnership with The Weather Channel into something else, as in own the channel, if CBS got a hand of The Weather Channel, it will team up with networks like CBS Sports Net and CBS Sports for details about the weather and how it may affect the sporting events they cover. and not to mention it would be under a group of CBS owned cable nets like CBS Sports Net, Pop! (co-owned by CBS with Lionsgate) and the Showtime/The Movie Channel/Flix suite of channels.
21st Century Fox: why the heck not, Fox owns Fox News Channel and Fox Business, and Fox News is well beloved by a certain political party and their views. but if Fox got hold of the Weather Channel, it would be more weather with a "Fox attitude" when it comes to the coverage as Fox could re brand the channel to Fox Weather Channel and have some cross promotion with the Fox owned channels and when severe weather hits a region with a Fox O&O, expect local coverage from their Fox sister stations, example: if a tornado outbreak hit Dallas, then they would go to KDFW's Fox 4 coverage of it.
Discovery Networks: this one's a dark horse to me, this companies flagship channel Discovery has aired weather related reality programming before and Discovery has had Jim "gets excited over thundersnow" Cantore host a special with a daredevil doing some stunt. it could be a weird deal, but i Discovery got it, it would just be another channel to air bad reality shows about naked survivalist or rednecks hunting bigfoot in the woods.
Viacom: well, they would want it just cause.
Accuweather: why, simple, this company has been trying to launch a 24/7 weather channel and they have their growing pains and they want to merge TWC and become the biggest authority on weather.
WeatherNation: this upstart had gone through some hard struggles and growning pains since they launch orginally too soon at The Weather Cast on Dish during the 2010 contract fight with TWC, since then, they want to well, grow some more and become the new face of weather coverage. the network alone started up in it's current form in 2011, they added local TV stations as their partners across some cities and be placed on their OTA subchannels and then in 2013, they were added to DirecTV line up and then added earlier this year to Dish's lineup. this one would be a dark horse candidate to buy out TWC as TWC's more established and maybe more pricey then WN.
that's all i can think of that would buy The Weather Channel out from NBC Universal/Comcast and the investors who co-owned the channel with NBCU. again, this is my choices and my options, not actual buyers as Comcast hasn't offically put the channel on the market yet for sale.
A couple of thoughts... If Time Warner, CBS, 21st Century, etc. were to buy TWC, rebranding it to fit in with CNN, CBS News, Fox News, or whatever would be an awful idea. "The Weather Channel" is a very, very well established brand that is recognized in some form (the network, website, app) by most people. The name is most definitely not the problem. That said, I can't see 21st Century Fox or Disney ever being interested in TWC. Discovery or Viacom would be interesting "outside the box" candidates. Accuweather-TWC would be waaaayyy too huge to be allowed. And what makes you think Weathernation has anywhere close to enough money to buy the behemoth that is TWC?
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