Who owns The Weather Channel?

Factual Questions
1

The Weather Channel, cable TV and internet weather forecasting provider.

On one of their “news” pages, I found this disclaimer: The Weather Company’s primary journalistic mission is to report on breaking weather news, the environment and the importance of science to our lives. This story does not necessarily represent the position of our parent company, IBM.

My reaction was: The Weather Channel is owned by IBM? Wikipedia states that The Weather Company, the former owner of The Weather Channel, has been part of IBM since 2016. The entry for The Weather Company says that was previously owned by a Blackstone/Bain/NBC consortium, and in 2016 sold The Weather Company, but not The Weather Channel, to IBM. In 2018 The Weather Channel was sold to Entertainment Studios.

News articles from earlier this year say that The Weather Channel was sold by Blackstone/Bain/NBC to Entertainment Studios, so no IBM intermediary.

So why does The Weather Channel (weather.com) state that IBM is their parent company?

2

As of March 2018, Byron Allen’s Entertainment Studios {Cite} owns The Weather Channel TV Network … today, maybe not …

IBM owns the websitbe [sic] …

3

Possible that the new owner (ES) just has not had the time/money to update all the places where ownership and/or operated-by details is lagging?

I’ve seen in the past, with similar situations, where getting all of those details corrected does lag considerably - just a guess is all.

4

From Wikipedia, “The Weather Channel’s former parent company, The Weather Company (part of IBM since 2016), also provides forecasts for terrestrial and satellite radio stations, newspapers, mobile apps and websites, including an extensive online presence at weather.com. The Weather Channel continues to license its brand assets and weather data from IBM.”

Personally, I think it’s slightly weird that IBM owned a cable channel.

5

Not really.
A whole lot of weather prediction comes from processing a massive amount of data in computerized weather models. And who happens to have a whole lot of big computer mainframes available?

6

Or one Watson with a bit of spare time. Seriously though, a lot of supercomputers are used for climate simulations, e.g.: weather forecasting.

AFAK, other than developing technologies like Watson, IBM just builds mainframes, and doesn’t keep them around to play with.

7

I don’t agree.

IBM operated ‘service bureaus’ doing data processing starting in 1932 (at that time, they were punch card technology). Later they were offering early computer services.
They split this off as a separate company (Service Bureau Corp – the original ‘cloud’) in 1957, after a government anti-trust case. It did data processing for lots of companies, on IBM mainframes. In 1973, if went to Control Data when they won another anti-trust lawsuit (and IBM agreed to stay out of that business for 20 years).

About the late 1990’s-2000, IBM got back in, operating large computing centers that did computing remotely for large companies. These were companies that had decided the overhead of maintaining & staffing a computer center was too high, and IBM could do it cheaper. Often, they sold their existing mainframe(s) back to IBM.
About this time, I was working for Dayton-Hudson (Target) Corp in Minnesota. But our actual mainframe computer was located somewhere in Colorado (Boulder), in a big IBM center with several other mainframes besides ours. (One advantage: in busy times (like around Xmas) we could easily obtain extra computing resources by renting time on somebody elses’ mainframe in that center. In fact, it was automatic – individual programmers & users didn’t have to do anything for it.)

I believe this system is still operating today. So IBM does keep a lot of its’ mainframes around.

8

IBM didn’t own the cable channel. They bought all of The Weather Company except the channel in 2016.

9

To add to Tim@T-Bonham.net’s post, here is a breakdown of IBM revenue.

Hardware is:

That’s 2015, but I used to work for a competitor in the hardware segment and hardware revenues have probably gone down since then. Money in IT these days, HP also, is in consulting and services, not hardware.
I assume IBM has some cloud service segment, which would use IBM equipment.