AccuWeather, a company that has been providing weather services to television stations for 40 years, has been slowly moving into a competitive position with stations by providing local information directly to consumers. This week, the company released a series of widgets for bloggers and other Website (or page) creators that will expand their reach exponentially. This includes MySpace pages. Here’s a reduced screen grab from the AccuWeather site:

Let me repeat myself: local stations need to get into the widget business — and especially in the weather space, because companies like AccuWeather and Weather.com are using this as a back door to steal the local weather franchise from local television stations. We’re so busy trying to “drive traffic” to our portals that we’re missing what’s really going on in the unbundled world.

In a Wall St. Journal article about the threat to cable by the internet, Comcast COO Steve Burke makes this remarkably insightful comment: “Whether the Internet is a friend or foe depends on what we do.” This is true for everybody in the Media 1.0 space. The web is a friend if you get in sync with it and explore the marvelous opportunities it presents. It is a powerful foe, however, if you cling to old business models or, worse yet, do nothing.

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