Met Office lose BBC contract

[Zak33]

Quite surprised by this...they have been partnered for all eternity!

Either way...the BBC has to get best value for our licence fee and so it turns out that the Met is too expensive except for severe weather warnings

If they're moving to someone like Accuweather....good,luck. If it's,as accurate as,my android weather predictions with Accuweather...they'll secretly download the Met app and use that behind the scenes.

[Andy3536]

So having read the article about this on the BBC, it seems that the BBC are only now putting the contract out to tender. Well, if they've not done that already how do they know that the Met office is going to be more expencive??
And surely the Met office could simply re-apply during the tender?
Is this not just a case of the BBC trying to 'seem' like it's saving money to the public and MPs trying to reduce the service??

[TheAnimus]

A mate of mine did some analysis on predictions of weather forecasts a few years back. This was localised only to London, looking at forecast vs observed.

Accuweather came out top, the met was 3rd or 4th I think.

[abaxas]

Give me the money.... I can forecast the UK weather with an almost 95% accuracy.

[Knoxville]

Surprising. I find Accuweather just reliable enough to use it in a "So what's the weather doing today?" capacity but for anything further than twelve hours ahead I tend to rely on Metcheck. Usually it isn't far off either.

[BobF64]

I look out the window, works just fine for my needs.

[The Hand]

Maybe they forecast too much rain on bank holidays? lol

[BobF64]

As long as the BBC is sensible and legally binds the tender winner to do the job for the money they asked for, even if it makes the winner go bankrupt, then its fine.

[jas88]

So having read the article about this on the BBC, it seems that the BBC are only now putting the contract out to tender. Well, if they've not done that already how do they know that the Met office is going to be more expencive??
And surely the Met office could simply re-apply during the tender?
Is this not just a case of the BBC trying to 'seem' like it's saving money to the public and MPs trying to reduce the service??

I thought they'd already gone through the first stage of tendering, and the Met Office hadn't even made it to the shortlist stage - so we don't know who will win, yet, we just know it's not them.

If the winner is better value, however the BBC are defining that for these purposes, fair enough: I've seen comments elsewhere suggesting the MO had probably got complacent after so long being the only provider, and didn't put enough effort into the tender. Maybe losing this will be a wakeup call and make them more competitive in future?

[nomelette]

I use Google Now on my phone to let me know the weather (it's just too easy!) and that uses weather.com, I believe - how does that fair I wonder?

[MacDragon]

Same here, I'm too lazy to do anything else.