The New ITV & BBC Weather Thread

Surprised this hasn't been in the press. What are Media Guardian up to?

They seem to mostly talk about Australian TV these days. And their articles about TV are pretty poor. Lots of "I never watched this show, but wasn't it awful?" type articles.

The weather warnings will continue to be provided by the Met Office after the change as far as I’m aware. The forecast itself will be provided by Meteogroup. It will be interesting to see how that works in practice.
I’m looking forward to the new graphics too. Partly because my background is interfaces/HCI/usability.
Notice the careful wording in the tweet: “for up to 6 months”.

Yes, I noticed the 'up to six months' line.
Sounds like there is some sort of underlying 'showstopper' issue, that needs time to sort out - once done, cut the broadcast forcasting ties with the Met Office and off we go with the Meteogroup.

But they've had plenty of time to sort these issues out, since the new supplier was annouced.
Very strange.

Not just strange. Frankly, this doesn't look good at all. Got to wonder, is there something rotten going on at Meteogroup?

It seems more likely to me that either the BBC or Meteogroup completely underestimated the challenges in changing providers, and didn’t realise it would take much longer than expected.

Poor on both sides then and both their arses effectively being saved by the Met Office not bailing on them.

An April 1st debut an opportunity for some fun though.

The tweets have been deleted.

Be mindful there are quite a lot of dependencies here, when trying to synchronise the broadcast launch with a refreshed suite of web/mobile products. As well as migrating over to MG's data, there's also a separate contract ending with MetraWeather, which has a pretty broad impact since Weatherscape is also used to render some web assets. The original time frame might have been a bit ambitious, but the scope has changed quite a bit over time!

As this switch involves IT and computing systems I suppose I’m right in saying that IT projects rarely run to time or budget.

I can't agree with that at all. The IT projects I have worked on have delivered on time / early...unless the client is difficult, at which point deadlines get missed due to the client not being available to sign off to progress to the next stage. Couple with the with client being unreasonable, members of the delivery team come and go frequently.

Government/public service IT projects are notorious for not going to schedule. Universal Credit still has IT issues to this day.