Joining with private equity firms Blackstone and Bain Capital, NBC Universal bid $3.5 billion to acquire the Weather Channel and Weather.com. The cable channel is available in 97 percent of all cable TV home and has 96 million U.S. subscribers. With its local coverage and the always popular schadenfreude-laced disaster porn excerpted in the video above, Weather.com can claim a "people count" of 19 million in the U.S., according to Compete.

Our source was right: Greg Gittrich is leaving the Daily News for NBC. "Insiders at NBC tell Media Ink that he is going to be the news editor of the digital operations of NBC Local Media Group, a new job." [Post]

What's the bigger scandal in Kim Masters' recent rundown of the kerfuffle between Ari Emanuel and Ben Silverman: That Slate published the whole thing with Emanuel's name repeatedly misspelled "Emmanuel," or that Silverman would dare stand Emanuel up not once but twice in meetings with Marvel boss David Maisel and producer/director Peter Berg? We honestly don't know, but for sheer cafeteria-slapfight drama, we're leaning toward the latter:

Funny how the most obnoxious of critics often have the thinnest skins. Noah Oppenheim-the NBC producer in the news this week because he's leaving The Today Show for a production company cosy with the network-has an appetite for controversy. Unless it involves him: Oppenheim has had at least one critical article by Brian Stelter removed from Mediabistro's TV Newser website.

Jeff Zucker isn't making many friends these days. After tussling with Harvey Weinstein a few weeks ago over the fate of Project Runway and then feuding with Fox over the Bill O'Reilly-Keith Olbermann feud, he's now directing his aim at Fox Business News. He told Charlie Rose that the upstart posed no competition to CNBC: "It's not even, frankly, in the same universe with us." To which Fox replied in an official statement: "In Jeff's universe, where his entire career has been based on failing upwards, CNBC's performance would be considered a success." More analysis here. The video from Rose's interview with Zucker is here.

· After a season of slumping ratings, Idol's finale matched last year's, pulling in an estimated 31.7 million viewers—roughly the same number of people who revisited their own gag reflexes upon hearing Mike Myers's pedophilic suggestion the David Archuleta would soon sprout "hair in weird and wonderful places." [Variety]
· We mourn the death of the once great and mighty television movie with news that the Tiffany network is "dumping" two long-completed examples of the genre—Mary-Louise Parker in Vinegar Hill and a Jessica Lange-starring remake of Sybil—in the Saturday night TV burial ground. RIP CBS MOW. [Variety]

A source tells us that Metro ed Gregg Gittrich is indeed out at the Daily News. Gittrich was widely consdered a rising star, maybe even next in line for the managing editor gig. But the NYDN isn't great about holding onto talent. And maybe Greg's taste of TV glory on unwatched 2006 reality program Tabloid Wars inspired him—we hear he quit the Daily News to go to NBC. If you know what he may or may not be doing at NBC, drop us a line.

San Francisco-based blog network Sugar Publishing has bought StarBrand Media, a company that works with television producers to highlight and sell clothing and furnishings that appear in popular shows such as Gossip Girl, making every moment in every show an opportunity to place a product. One network it doesn't work with yet is NBC, which just happens to have invested in Sugar Publishing.

NBC executives hop back and forth from a certain TV production company with the alacrity of former Pentagon officials working their connections for a corrupt defense contractor. The latest? Today Show producer Noah Oppenheim is moving to Reveille, the production unit started by NBC wunderkind co-boss Ben Silverman. Reveille-now owned by mogul-daughter Elisabeth Murdoch-brought shows such as The Office to NBC. So now Oppenheim will be pitching projects to his former boss on behalf of the very company which made Silverman's fortune. How very cosy. (TV Newser)

· Will Smith will produce the U.S. version of Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis, a little French comedy sleeper about a post office manager banished to the boonies. "There are only 65 million people who live in France, and $191 million seemed to defy all logic," explained producer Ken Stovitz, his eyes rolling to the back of his head and passing clear out as he did some quick calculations and came up with an opening weekend domestic total of $1.2 billion. [Variety]
· John Grisham's novel Playing For Pizza, about a slice of pizza who gets recruited by a high-power law firm only to find itself caught up in a web of corruption and intrigue and eventually eaten by a hungry sanitation worker, has been optioned by Phoenix Pictures. [THR]
· John Woo will tackle 1949—a "a big budget romancer," that is not, to our knowledge, a sequel to the 1979 Steven Spielberg film picking up eight years into the high-flying adventures of Cpt. Wild Bill Kelso and friends. [Variety]

Users of Microsoft's Windows Media Center began having trouble using the software to copy NBC shows for later viewing like any DVR would. The reason? The network had marked copying the show as verboten under the terms of the FCC's proposed, but never implemented, broadcast-flag rules. In other words, Microsoft is enforcing a law that does not exist. (An EFF video, "The Corruptibles," provides a good, if activist-biased, explanation of the broadcast-flag controversy.) [News.com]

The White House sent a FURIOUS letter to NBC news. They claim they're mad at how NBC edited Richard Engel's interview with the president last week. It's all bullshit, obv. The details, transcript, letter, and video—after the jump!

Liz Gannes, a veteran online video reporter whom I've worked with and is no slouch when it comes to getting almost any newfangled content application to function, couldn't get NBC's relaunched video-on-demand software to work. The offering is powered by a file-sharing download process from Pando, but not much good if users can't even install the software. Isn't there a company that already has a delivery and payment system for 720p video content from the networks — one that NBC used to work with? Meanwhile, to get your 30 Rock fix online, Gannes says stick with Hulu. Just looking at the listed bugs on the download page would be enough to scare off anyone who's confused by file-sharing sites.

Exploring, perhaps, her inner Bill O'Reilly, WNBC news anchor Sue Simmons turned what should have been a straightforward promo for the evening news into an angry cuss-out of one of her co-workers. And Simmons' cursing made it onto the air, unlike Fox News anchor O'Reilly's recently-publicized meltdown. We've received several emails from viewers who caught the cursing during a break in the season finale for NBC drama Medium, and now there's video, posted after the jump. UPDATE: And Simmons has now apologized for scandalizing the entire city of New York with the f-word. UPDATE2: Since these things come in threes I'm now waiting for Anderson Cooper to have a meltdown involving lack of skin moisturizer or something.

It's difficult to properly convey to you the excitement level that hits you the second you walk through the revolving doors at 30 Rockefeller Center before a live taping of Saturday Night Live. After all, it's one of the hardest tickets to get in show business. So, unlike a concert or athletic event where you can see the eyes of some attendees glazing over from boredom, everyone who is in attendance is someone who desperately wants to be there. As anyone who is in the building will attest, the energy in these moments is both palpable and kinetic. And that's just in the lobby of the ground floor of the building!

Confirming rumors that his appointment as Conan O'Brien's Late Night successor was a "done deal," a press event at 30 Rock today presided over by dark SNL overlord Lorne Michaels, NBC rock star Ben Silverman, and badly-in-need-of-a-distinguishing-nickname Marc Graboff, made official their intention to hand over the 12:30 a.m. programming block to one Jimmy Fallon. Goodbye, Masturbating Bear and Pimpbot 5000, hello, masturbating Barry Gibb and '80s radio hits set to "You Can't Touch This." From The Observer:

The Observer covered NBC's press conference anointing never-funny (but cute!) former SNLer Jimmy Fallon the new king of late-late night. They included this anecdote: "Mr. Fallon claimed his kindergarten yearbook featured his photo above the caption 'Most Likely to Take Over David Letterman.' (Someone in the crowd, possibly auditioning to be Mr. Fallon's sidekick, let out an audible 'Wow' at this point.) When asked what kindergarten had yearbooks, much less ones with references to David Letterman, Mr. Fallon joked, 'It's a magical kindergarten. It's taught by a unicorn, a talking unicorn.'" See? He's doing some of that funny joking-around stuff the late-night comics do. But no one told the Associated Press, as you can see in the attached story. [NYO, AP]

· Fox has picked up J.J. Abrams's Fringe, about a female FBI agent who "tackles unexplained medical and scientific phenomena," and Joss Whedon's Dollhouse, both for mid-season debuts meant to be bolstered by American Idol's return, an effect Fox internally refers to as "the Drunk-Paula Boost." [Variety]
· The CW makes it official: The Beverly Hills, 90210 spinoff is a go, with Jennie Garth reprising her role as Kelly Taylor. New York magazine will eventually go on to declare the series "mankind's greatest single achievement since the Wright brothers perfected human flight." [THR]
· ABC, meanwhile, has ordered "quirky sci-fi thriller" Life on Mars, a new animated series from Mike Judge called The Goode Family, and Ashton Kutcher reality show Opportunity Knocks. Unlike last year's Cavemen, none are based on an insurance commercial—though Allstate, a "drama with supernatural elements" starring Dennis Haysbert as a creepy guy who has a way of always showing up at highway accidents, is said to be a possible mid-season replacement. [Variety]

As a a part of a deal to bring HBO shows to the iTunes store, Apple will allow a content producer to break its $1.99-per-show price structure for the first time, HBO employees involved in the deal told Portfolio. Last summer, Apple CEO Steve Jobs refused to allow NBC to do the same, so NBC boss Jeff Zucker took his shows elsewhere — to Microsoft and the Zune, specifically. Why did HBO get the deal while NBC didn't?