MetService forces WeatherWatch.co.nz to stop Daily Highs service

Posted by hitadmin on Fri, 20/04/2012 - 11:37
Filed in:National News
The government forecaster, MetService, has again flexed its muscle towards WeatherWatch.co.nz by raising the price of our daily highs feed from zero to almost $30,000 - forcing WeatherWatch.co.nz to scrap the service altogether.

Head weather analyst Philip Duncan says the pricing is astronomical for a product that isn't even used for forecasting.  "This is the list of daily highs, taken from publicly owned weather stations across the country. We expected a small fee, but to suggest $29,400 plus GST per year as a price is simply designed to again block WeatherWatch.co.nz from providing a service to the public of New Zealand".

"We accept the government asks MetService to make a profit but when does that become anti competitive?  MetService is one of the most profitable SOE's in the country, they don't need to charge wild prices for very small products"

Mr Duncan says the WeatherWatch.co.nz website receives only a fraction of the traffic MetService.com does, but are treated as serious competition.  "We have never seen MetService as competition, we openly say we'd like to work with them, especially around severe weather events, but they aren't interested".

MetService has long had a reputation for being expensive.  In the past few years WeatherWatch.co.nz has been quoted anywhere from $40,000 to $200,000 to have radar images on our website - the very same ones that are free at MetService.com.

Despite being a state owned enterprise MetService receives significant tax payer funding for various services.

Mr Duncan says he will be raising this with the Commerce Commission, as he did last year with the rain radar network.

After years of public pressure by WeatherWatch.co.nz MetService finally agreed to free up the radar service in November last year, from hourly updates to 7 minute updates

"In the past I think some in the public thought WeatherWatch had an issue with MetService - now I think the public are very clearly seeing it is their bullying attitude towards us that is causing the problems".

The price change came when WeatherWatch.co.nz asked MetService for a new FTP site to retrieve the data.  "We said we expected a reasonable fee to do this and were willing to pay one - but $30,000 a year for something that is used as just an interest piece at the end of each day is simply ludicrous".

Despite this data being free in most other countries MetService says the pricing was based on other prices in the market.

"We have a serious problem when the government forecaster jumps at the chance to charge huge amounts of money for these products but refuses to even reply to our requests of working proactively together in the interests of public safety, which we have done repeatedly over the past 6 months".

WeatherWatch.co.nz is looking into other options for the service.

www.weatherwatch.co.nz

I presume you are speaking of the Maps they have running under Current Weather.
http://www.metvuw.com/nzweather/

With permission from weather watch we were also posting the Highs for the day in our daily weather thread. I guess we better not start leeching them off the Metservice without permission.
I dont have a spare $30,000.

Of course if 1 of us had more time we could actually do our own Highs and Lows

Yep I am also thinking along those lines.
I am collecting manually 42 stations data a day now. I could easily turn that into 50. That is a good coverage of New Zealand. The only trouble is the data provided is not universal. In fact their is 5 different layouts I am sourcing from. Hence your idea is not going to be easy. 
There are 2 txt files that are the main ones so even if we could sort something for them, that would be a start.

Keep thinking Ohauiti

check out
http://www.nordicweather.net/nwn.php
for what can be done re toplists link

Hi weather display. Yes I did find it.
But also decided we were talking a lot of work here

They are still posting daily highs? http://www.weatherwatch.co.nz/daily_highs

It could of course just be that their current contract is still valid

If you (in this case Metservice) had information that you had to pay for to maintain wouldnt you expect some payment for its use, especially when its your so called competition? Or am I being mean spirited like Metservice?? Also its all well in good suggesting using this network of wx stations for a daily highs list BUT accuracy of alot of these stations is questionable? I have had various PWS and the minimum for accuracy & reliability in my opinion is DAVIS stations.

I agree with you as well deepsouth. One thing I have never liked about ww is the fact that they are media backed giving them an opportunity to push their side of the story often via poor unbalanced media reporting.
I'm always suspicious when ww attempt to Garner support in this way.

If you re read the article you'll see it reports purely a ww viewpoint. There is no comment from ms to balance the reporting. And neither would you expect it. Commercial discussions between organisations are not normally discussed in the media. But for some reason ww have decided to go public on this.

I see their point on this 30k is alot for something the ms publishes on their website (but not for free. Its provided under contract to the government paid out of our taxes) but I don't think that's a fair comparison. Ww appear to ask the metservice for this data in a non standard format accessed in a non standard way. Both parties agree that there should be a cost. Ww provide their requirements. Ms cost them and provide a price and ww then start publicly attacking the ms in an attempt to put pressure on the ms to reduce the cost. That  isnt a great way to perform contract negotiations. 

What should happen is that ww change their requirements to reduce the cost. As an extreme example if ww really wanted to save money they could just pull them manually off the ms website for free- but obviously they don't want that and they would have to state the data is provided by the nz govt and or the metservice. Somewhere in the middle is the point that everyone is happy with and that's what both parties negotiate to.

At a guess I would suggest 30 k is about on the mark for this work assuming that the FTP server needs to be  purchased and setup , potentially a backup server is required as well, and the data format needs to be agreed, built, access through firewalls established and the whole lot gets tested and supported ongoing by the ms . I don't see alot of change out of 30k for that.

So it seems to me that the original article doesn't compare apples with apples. Yes the data is available on the ms website but if you start to think about what they are actually asking for, what's involved and what the article is not telling you, then I think you'll find that as much as we would like to think it is, the whole truth may not be being presented here

My 2c anyway or maybe I'm just looking at this way too deeply!

Sent from my idroid using tapatalk2

good write up that gabba