advertising tags for overlay on national advertisements seen on the national feed, displaying localized addresses for retailers, and on newer models, tagging products seen during breaks (such as pollen reports). The Weather Channel provides its STAR units to cable and IPTV providers free of charge. Programming and maintenance of all units is handled by engineers employed by each provider, who are able to modify specifications to generate locally specific weather data, program locally specific greetings for LOT8s segment introductions, generate test alerts viewable only by cable company technicians performing silent remote administration tests, and make upgrades and repairs to the unit's software and hardware. Although extremely rare, the programmability of STAR units at the headend level can leave systems vulnerable to possible tampering. One such instance occurred over Mediacom’s Des Moines, Iowa system on July 21, 2022, when the introductory message to a LOT8s segment displayed a racial slur that was tacked onto a default greeting used to open the segment (one of several programmed into all IntelliStar units that are usually modified only to reference the municipality of the STAR unit), reading "Hello Des Moines, This is your weather my Niggers." TWC parent Allen Media Group (owned and overseen by Black media entrepreneur Byron Allen, and which acquired TWC from a consortium of NBCUniversal, Blackstone and Bain Capital in 2018) stated it would investigate the source of the message, which originated within Mediacom's local headend operations. (A partially censored screenshot of the message was posted on Twitter by a local journalist and circulated on the platform.) History Since its introduction at TWC's launch in May 1982, several generations of the WeatherStar have been used. , two STAR models (the IntelliStar 2 and IntelliStar 2 Jr.) are currently being used by cable and IPTV providers for generation of local weather information on the channel. Weather Star I The original WeatherStar system, the Weather Star I, was released upon The Weather Channel's launch. Like subsequent WeatherStar units, it received local weather data from TWC and the National Weather Service, via data encoded in the vertical blanking interval of TWC's video feed, as well as receiving extra data from a subcarrier transmitted above TWC's video and audio signals on its transponder on satellite. The Weather Star I was manufactured and developed for TWC by Salt Lake City, Utah-based Compuvid. A couple of years before TWC was founded, Compuvid had already made a