NBC Universal reaches deal to buy Weather Channel from Landmark

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The deal has ended a drawn-out process that had attracted interest from several major media companies.

According to a person close to the deal, the purchase price was around $3.5 billion. The person was not identified because the terms were not made public. The Weather channel will be operated as a separate entity based in Atlanta and NBC Universal will provide management, according to statements released by the companies.

The partners that aided NBC in the transaction were private equity firms the Blackstone Group and Bain Capital.

The Weather Channel can be seen by 97 per cent of U.S. cable subscribers. On top of acquiring the Weather Channel the deal also includes several related assets such as weather services for newspapers and radio stations and the widely viewed website Weather.com.

The website, owned buy Landmark, drew 36.4 million unique U.S. viewers in May and that made it the 15th most-popular Internet property, according to ComScore Inc., a Reston, Va., researcher.

James Goss is an analyst at Barrington Research in Chicago and he says that this could embellish their presence and that the deal also eliminates the Weather Channel as a competitor.

NBC Universal, a unit of General Electric Co., became the sole bidder for the Weather Channel last month after Time Warner Inc. dropped out of the bidding. CBS and Comcast also said that they were interested early on in the bidding.

NBC operates NBC weather Plus, only 4 years old, and the acquisition makes a logical fit with the Weather Channel. NBC weather plus can be viewed on cable services operated by NBC stations.

The transaction is expected to be closed by the year-end because of regulatory approval. There are about 1,3000 people who work at the Weather channel and it is estimated that the Weather channel's annual revenue is $550 million.

Landmark is a privately held media company based in Virgina and they put the Weather Channel up for sale in January among with its other businesses, which included the Virginian-Pilot and eight other daily newspapers.