after the discontinuation. Verizon said its reason for dropping the services was because many customers turn to the internet and mobile apps for weather any time of day. While the domestic IntelliStars were decommissioned and replaced by newer IntelliStar2 units on November 16, 2015, the modified IntelliStar units continued to run Weatherscan until December 12, 2022. Sale to Entertainment Studios On March 22, 2018, Byron Allen's Entertainment Studios announced its intent to acquire The Weather Channel's television assets from an NBCUniversal/Blackstone Group partnership. The actual value is undisclosed, but was reported to be around $300 million; the channel's non-television assets, which were separately sold to IBM two years prior, were not included in the sale. End of operations In a letter to the National Cable Television Cooperative, which most remaining cable affiliates are part of, dated September 12, 2022, Weather Group Television announced that they would be terminating the Weatherscan service no later than December 9, 2022, with a preference to take it off the air sooner rather than later. Declining viewership, the availability of weather conditions and forecasts through computers as well as smartphone weather apps, and aging equipment were cited as the main reasons that the channel is going offline, making the operations of the once iconic service outdated and no longer necessary. Those same reasons ultimately led to major television providers dropping the channel previously between March 2015 and December 2017. In addition, Weatherscan did not broadcast in HD, which is nearly general for television news and weather in the United States by the time of the shut-down announcement. The remaining providers exercised their options to air their in-house local weather services, switch to similar networks such as AccuWeather Network, WeatherNation, or Fox Weather; or delete the channel space entirely. However, Weatherscan has largely been replaced in function with Local Now. Weatherscan was officially discontinued on December 12, 2022, three days after the original end-of-service date. Products Weatherscan displayed a variety of forecast products that show different types of weather information, some of which are not included on certain providers. During the early 2000s, when the channel's segments were generated mainly by WeatherStar XL systems, up to five different products, excluding the local product, could be chosen for display. Weatherscan timeline Note: "Domestic IntelliStar" refers to STARs that output content for The Weather Channel. National/satellite feed When Weatherscan Local debuted in 1999, the channel maintained a national