The IntelliStar was the fifth-generation successor to the WeatherStar systems used by the Americancable and satellite television channelThe Weather Channel, that is used to insertlocalforecasts and current weather information into TWC's programming. Like the WeatherStar, it is installed at the cable provider's headend. The IntelliStar has many enhanced features over its predecessor, the Weather Star XL. Like all other WeatherStar systems, the IntelliStar receives its data over a satellite connection and over the Internet. However, unlike the rest of the systems, it has the capability to receive more complex information in a more efficient manner. It also has a DualFeed feature, which allows a selection of two different video feeds. In the event of inclement weather, the DualFeed option would switch from the first feed, to a second feed, providing weather information to a specific STAR or network of STARs. By doing this, the specified network of STARs could be addressed with weather updates, versus the entire national network of STARs. It also has an improved graphics display and dynamic radar capabilities. HiRAD technology – which was added to the IntelliStar in 2006 – allows The Weather Channel to choose any city, town or landmark as an observation or forecast site and provide data. Occasionally, the HiRAD function will fail, in which case the National Weather Service sites are used. In May 2015, it was announced that all IntelliStar units would be replaced with either the IntelliStar 2 or the IntelliStar 2 Jr. by October 1, 2015. The IntelliStar was discontinued on November 16, 2015.
Design
The IntelliStar differs in design from previous WeatherStar units, as the system is basically a customized rack-mount Intel CPU-based personal computer. It runs on the FreeBSDoperating system, running specialized software written by The Weather Channel to make it function as an IntelliStar, but otherwise using commodity hardware of the PC platform. This was done to minimize maintenance costs, and to ease upgrading of the IntelliStar units. The previous WeatherStar units used a proprietary hardware design that hampered any hardware upgrades. TWC has contributed code to the FreeBSD development community, and funded the initial development of Radeon 8500/R200 generation 3D graphics drivers used under both Linux and FreeBSD.
