Broadcasters using video for storytelling

Creating a compelling weather story for digital channels

Compelling weather visualizations increase engagement and cultivate loyalty with your viewers. Although digital videos are impactful, it can be difficult to scale production. Without the proper tools in place, video storytelling can be a hard initiative to prioritize despite its benefits.

In this blog, we’ll discuss how to improve your video storytelling for digital channels such as mobile, social, OTT and web, the advantages of video and how to scale your efforts.

Let’s dive in.

What is video storytelling?

Video storytelling utilizes engaging visuals to construct a narrative. With the help of video content, storytelling techniques can promote an emotional connection, while increasing engagement. While the art of storytelling is nothing new, video is making a big impact in how viewers consume content. Perfectly suited to the modern consumer, video storytelling is a powerful addition to any broadcast strategy.

Video usage continues to increase across a multitude of platforms, including social media. Consider the following:

• Mobile usage continues to increase every year. People are watching 19 hours of online video in 2022, which is up 8.5 hours from 3 years ago.
• There are currently 244.4 million digital video viewers in the US.
• Consumers would rather see branded videos on social media than any other type of content.

As you can see, video is a powerful, in-demand medium that speaks to consumers and is only becoming more popular.

What is a video storytelling tool?

In a digital environment with multiple platforms at users’ disposal, creating unique content is more important than ever. In order to compete for viewer attention, your broadcast must be compelling and contain an engaging story. Videos are a great way to achieve this goal.

A video storytelling tool is designed to facilitate, support, streamline, and enhance the video production process. It should be secure, easy-to-access and scalable across the organization.

The Max suite of products, from The Weather Company, has been vital in helping broadcasters capture the attention of audiences through the power of world-class visualization and production tools. The Weather Company is leveraging the industry-leading, highly secure cloud to build SaaS products that can be used from anywhere. Max Velocity from The Weather Company, is the first product built on Max Cloud, which was built to drive collaboration through the scalability and security-rich environment of the cloud. Max Velocity was not only designed for broadcasters, but for anyone who needs digital content, such as editors and content producers.

Max Velocity is an easy-to-use, browser-based video production solution designed to help teams boost their creative output through cutting-edge graphics and videos. The beauty of this product is that you can easily bring in on-air Max content for digital video use.

While it may seem like you need specialized skills to run a video storytelling tool, the mission of platforms, such as Max Velocity, is to make video production fast and streamlined. Creating content is easy, since teams can easily work together no matter their location.

How to use video storytelling to create a compelling weather story

Video storytelling can be used in a multitude of ways. Below are just a few of the things that can benefit from strong visuals and content.

Weather

A great weather forecast demands truly great storytelling. Fortunately, a video storytelling tool helps you harness your inner storyteller.

Provide a visual representation of weather patterns affecting your area, showcase new systems that will develop in the coming days, or provide real-time radar grabs to help your viewers understand exactly what the next week will bring. Users can also easily include Max content in their videos such as Max Reality scenes.

Traffic updates

Provide real-time, to-the-minute traffic updates with a video storytelling tool that allows you to produce and publish content – no matter where you are. Thanks to the streamlined interface of our video production tool, you can pull in existing Max Traffic content and assets to build traffic news videos and live streams.

Whether you’re helping viewers plan their morning commute or reporting on an accident holding up traffic, video storytelling can help you engage and inform your viewers.

News

It’s not enough to report the news – you need to make it come to life. With a video storytelling tool, you can easily bring experts and sponsors on-screen, even from remote locations, with a single click of a button. This is a great way to add insight and credibility. Additionally, you can leverage cloud production with different stations or utilize broadcast templates to create videos on breaking news more quickly.

Sports

Viewers love high-quality, well-produced sports videos. Make yours stand out by inviting players, coaches or commentators to be part of the story that your viewers will share again and again. Additionally, reporters can leverage weather graphics if severe weather conditions are affecting a game.

In the event of wind, Jim Politis, Weather Company product manager for Max Velocity noted, “zoom into the stadium and see which outfield the wind is blowing toward and assess how likely it will be for your slugger to score the team some runs.” There are numerous ways to make a sports story more engaging and weather is a strong component.

Lifestyle

Create compelling lifestyle content such as gardening tips with a streamlined digital storytelling interface that local advertisers can easily sponsor driving monetization for your company.

5 big benefits of digital video storytelling with Max Velocity

Are you still wondering how digital video storytelling can positively impact your engagement or why you should onboard a tool to help? Here are five benefits to consider:

1. Fast, simple publishing of video graphics.

Without a dedicated video storytelling tool, you’ll spend hours trying to create compelling visual weather graphics. Max Velocity provides unique templates and visuals that are easy to leverage – even without a specialized degree. Your team can also utilize a library of scenes that The Weather Company created for your needs. Additionally, since you can access Max Velocity through a browser, you can create videos anytime and anywhere.

2. Increase authority and credibility.

Credibility is the foundation of a great broadcast. With a video storytelling tool, you can bring experts, sponsors or even viewers on-screen to build credibility. Video storytelling tools make this whole process easy.

Politis notes that The Weather Company has streamlined the interview process to make it easier for broadcasters to manage. “Instead of having to drive over to another location to do an interview and coordinate all of that, just grab a link, send that via text or email. The source then clicks on the link and they can join in on the session immediately.” By making it easy to conduct interviews and collaborate, your team can include experts and viewers on screen to give new perspectives, while making your broadcast more engaging.

3. Accelerate the production process.

Stop wasting time struggling through video content creation. Create beautiful videos fast and publish them across digital platforms. By leveraging Max Velocity and Max Cloud, you can save time and resources producing videos, since you can harness the power of your station group. Jerry Martz, senior account manager at The Weather Company noted that: “Stations that want to enhance their coverage in order to hang onto those new viewers can benefit from cloud workflows, which support the ability to create more content for multiple platforms quickly, easily and efficiently and also share their content “faster with far less friction” than they can today.”

It’s also easy to adjust video templates and themes. Politis noted that, “if you have a dedicated program with a slightly different look, you don’t have to spend hours upon hours pre-producing that. You can just go in and choose a different layout and a different theme and it’s a different experience for the content you’re creating.” Max Velocity can speed up the time it takes to create your video content, so you can share relevant stories and information with the public quickly.

4. Increase revenue for your station.

By creating more digital content, your team will create more opportunities for advertisements and partnerships with brands. Additionally, since you can quickly manage video and content assets across stations, your team will save time and resources in creating and producing news videos. News directors can also ensure that revenue is protected, since Max Cloud allows sister stations to cover for one another if a newsroom goes off the air.

5. Leverage teams from across the country.

By leveraging Max Velocity and Max Cloud, your teams can increase the number of people collaborating on the story, resulting in a better news or weather report. Organizations can better leverage their in-house expertise, and as a result create more compelling video assets. For example: If you have a meteorologist on the West Coast that is needed to cover a severe weather event in Florida, you can leverage Max products to facilitate video production remotely.

Video storytelling: The next great addition to your arsenal

The world has changed in recent years. As life becomes more fast-paced and media outlets continue to proliferate, people are searching for sources that genuinely affect them and provide an emotional and educational experience. That’s where video storytelling comes in. Your priority is to report compelling, exciting, accurate information. Video storytelling is a great way to enhance and improve your stories.

Adding a video storytelling tool to your stack can take your stories to the next level. Invite experts and commentators on-screen in real-time, create beautiful video graphics and streamline and simplify your production process – from start to finish. With Max Velocity, you can combine the power of storytelling with high-quality graphics. With Max Cloud, you can promote cross-site collaboration, to accelerate video production.