Al Jazeera windfall for MetService
Weather bulletins on Al Jazeera may soon start to look familiar to Kiwi viewers.
Al Jazeera will use weather graphics provided by the MetService for its global audience of more than 500 million households in a deal worth ‘‘hundreds of thousands of dollars’’ to the Wellington-based state-owned enterprise.
MetService has made money selling its Weatherscape software to broadcasters around the world for the past 25 years, and now has more than 30 customers including all the major New Zealand and Australian broadcasters.
Weatherscape has grown to bring in about $3 million a year in export earnings.
Weatherscape manager Neville Booth said the three-year contract with Al Jazeera was on a par with its biggest Australian deals and could also help the business gain profile as it pushed further into markets such as South-East Asia.
‘‘The real importance we see with Al Jazeera is the ‘recognition’ factor. It is one to name drop in every conversation.’’
MetService returned a dividend of $1.2 million to the Government’s coffers in the year to June.
Customising Weatherscape for Al Jazeera had involved pulling together a huge amount of data from the World Meteorological Association, Booth said.
‘‘We learnt a lot about the physics of dust and dust data sources which is a unique factor specific to Middle East weather forecasting.’’
Al Jazeera began using Weatherscape graphics in its Arabic bulletins last month and will start using them in its English-language bulletins at the start of next year.