We were flipping through our YouTube home page on Wednesday night when we noticed that Meteorologist Ryan Hall’s Live YouTube channel was being watched by over 250,000 people. We’ve seen Hall enough over the past couple of years to know that when he is live streaming, there is usually a significant severe weather event in progress. So, we clicked on the thumbnail to begin live streaming his coverage of a major storm system that was marching across Central Indiana and was basically on top of Indianapolis at the time.

Known as “Ryan Hall, Y’all” because of his native Kentucky accent and manner of speaking, Hall has become known by many YouTube fans as “The Internet’s Weather Man.” (He currently has 2.63 million subscribers on that platform, and over a million on TikTok.) His live streaming of severe weather events is basically an uninterrupted weather play-by-play, using radar imagery and state DOT cameras, punctuated by live pictures from various stormchasers with whom he communicates on cell phone-powered “walkie talkie” apps. Hall pulls marathon sessions as the ringmaster of all this information. On Wednesday, when we first checked in, he had been livestreaming for over seven hours.

But on this particular night, the storm system was extensive, extending from Indiana down to the border of Arkansas and Tennessee. It was instantly clear that Central Indiana was in the thick of it. That was our cue to try to check in on the local television broadcasters in Indianapolis and sample some of their coverage via online streaming.

Our first stop was Tegna-owned WTHR, the market’s NBC affiliate and longtime ratings leader. When we pulled up the station’s website on our iPhone, there was a severe weather banner near the top of the home page. Above that, on the title bar, was what appears to be the standard feature on all Tegna station websites, a small thumbnail next to the title of the station’s “plus” branded streaming offering. However, it took us too many precious moments to figure out just where to click to watch the station’s live coverage.

After a few minutes of viewing solid coverage of the severe weather in progress, we switched to watch some of the market’s FOX-CBS duopoly, the Nexstar-owned combo of WXIN (Fox 59) and WTTV (CBS 4). We opted to go to Fox59’s website first. We were pleased to find an easily located “Watch Now” button at the very top of the webpage. We crossed our fingers and clicked on the button, hoping we wouldn’t get a delayed replay of a previous newscast, which has been standard fare for Nexstar stations' streaming. We were pleased to land right in real-time coverage. We were less pleased to be subjected to a couple of pre-roll commercials before we got to the live weather coverage.

Not to get off on a rant here, as comedian Dennis Miller used to say in his monologues, but why is it necessary to have “pre-roll” commercials playing out during severe weather coverage? Yes, we understand that live streaming isn’t cheap to do. And it may not be technically simple to turn these off. But in these urgent situations where local stations will cut into regular programming without forcing TV viewers to sit through commercials, why would we think that would be acceptable for the online audience? Especially when you may have local viewers who have lost power and are trying to watch on cell phones or tablets. Unless they live next door to a cell site, the chances are high that they will sometimes lose the signal. Making them sit through a pre-roll commercial each time they try to bring up the live stream, _especially in a stressful situation, is frustrating at best. At worst, it could make viewers choose another station that doesn’t force them to sit through a commercial. It nearly did in our case.

We then checked in on locally owned WISH-TV8 of Circle City Broadcasting. The station is now a news-intensive CW affiliate, after losing the CBS affiliation in 2014. Again, we struggled to find out where to go to watch the station’s live coverage of the severe weather. After some searching, we found the “Watch Live” link at the very bottom of the website’s drop-down menu on the top right side. But for whatever reason, we could never get the livestream to load on WISHTV.com. Hopefully, that was just a bandwidth issue on our end.

And with apologies to WRTV, the Scripps-owned ABC affiliate in Indianapolis, by the time we thought about switching to them, the fast-moving storms were already crossing the state line to Ohio and leaving the market. By that point, we had moved on to checking in on stations in Cincinnati.

So why are we obsessing so much about finding how to watch live coverage from each of these Indianapolis stations?

Consider this scenario: severe weather arrives near your home or office. How do you receive the first notification of the threat? Unless you happen to be watching a local television station at the time, the reasonable answer is from your smartphone. If that warning prompts you to check on your favorite local television station, you will likely pull up either the station’s website or its dedicated mobile app. The ability to get to the live coverage as quickly and directly as possible might be a key factor in determining whether that viewer stays with the station they are trying to watch–or goes looking elsewhere for the vital information they need right now.

Even if they can find the live stream quickly, what impression do they have when they are presented with 30 seconds or even a full minute of commercials BEFORE they can tell if live coverage is in progress?

We have also noticed that most stations don’t include all the written information they show on television on their livestream. The weather “crawls,” or the information that typically appears at the top or bottom of the broadcast signal, doesn’t appear on the live stream. Given that many of these livestreams from local television stations also do not have closed captioning information included on them (it varies by station and how they caption their video signal and whether that gets passed on to the live stream) we would argue that including the weather crawl information would make it a better service, especially when meteorologists may not be focused on other parts of the market when they are tracking a specific area of the storm.

Another thing we want to point out is that many stations use an automated scheduling of replays of previous newscasts or other programming on their streaming channels. For heaven sakes, please have some way to override this schedule so that you don’t have this happen: During their continuing coverage on Wednesday night, WTHR+ treated viewers at 10:58pm to the beginning of a previously scheduled “Your Money” program for a solid minute or two before someone realized the problem and switched viewers of the livestream back to the live weather coverage that began the station’s 11pm newscast. We have seen this happen before, and sometimes, it isn’t corrected so quickly.

Television stations must treat their live streams in severe weather as just as important as their broadcast signal. During power outages, it is likely the only way viewers can access the vital coverage from their local TV stations. Ask the over 100 thousand homes without power during the storms in the Indianapolis market on Wednesday night where they were watching. Streaming issues aside, the work done by every meteorologist we watched on this particular evening was strong. We presume that because the National Severe Storms Laboratory had issued an outlook for conditions favorable for an outbreak of severe weather, the stations that we watched all seemed prepared for extended coverage with multiple meteorologists working and crews in the field both during primetime and well past their late newscast windows. This was true in Indianapolis, and as the storm system made its way east into Kentucky and Ohio, we watched similar continuing coverage from all of the stations in Cincinnati lasting well past 2:30am Eastern time.

We have some more observations about how the severe weather coverage we watched was executed, and we will be sharing those in a post tomorrow over on our “tvnews.coach” website.

Finally, let’s go back to Ryan Hall’s coverage on YouTube for a moment. With over 200,000 people still watching around 1:00 a.m., Hall had to acknowledge that he was facing a problem in that YouTube doesn’t allow live streams to go past twelve hours long. As he was closing in on that time limit, he told his audience that they were going to have to start a new live stream and that they were working to “redirect” current viewers over to it.

From that point forward, we couldn’t find the new live stream. Again, viewers looking for coverage, like us, went looking elsewhere to get what we needed at that time.

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