In a continuation of the consolidation in the media industry that has seen major media conglomerates diversifying their portfolios in recent times, General Electric-owned NBC Universal has tied up with Bain Capital and Blackstone to successfully negotiate the largest American leveraged buyout this year by buying The Weather Channel from Landmark Communications Inc. for an estimated $3.5 billion.

Similar deals in the recent past include NBC's acquisition of cable channel Bravo for $1.25 billion in 2002, News Corp spending $580 million to buy social networking site MySpace in 2005, and CBS buying tech news site CNET for $1.8 billion last May.

The winning consortium beat Time Warner in a closely contested auction after privately held Landmark Communications put Weather Channel and a variety of other media properties on the block.

The Weather Channel (TWC) will be run as a separate entity, based in Atlanta, with management services provided by NBC Universal. Available in some 96 million American homes, the Weather Channel is the country's third most widely distributed cable channel. It also runs the 14th most popular site on the Internet, weather.com.

The channel also has a brand-new $60 million state-of-the-art, high-definition recording studio in Atlanta, from which it can produce digital broadcasts both for television and the Web. Viewers can also look forward to long-form programming, like weather documentaries and dramas, that meld Weather Channel content with NBC talent.

The Blackstone Group, Bain Capital, and NBC will reportedly pay just $600 million each upfront, and finance the balance. The Weather Channel's estimated $175 million annual earnings should help defray the debt.

Deutsche Bank and GE Capital are providing some of the $1 billion or so of bank debt. Meanwhile, GSO Capital, a debt boutique Blackstone bought last year, and Sankaty Advisors, a unit of Bain Capital, will take up all of the junior debt and some of the bank debt.

There has been speculation that NBC's latest move is merely an effort to increase its valuation before GE offloads its media arm altogether. That is the reason, many analysts feel, why NBC agreed to pay a bit higher than an appropriate price.

With its catchphrase of ''The Weather Has Never Looked Better'', the channel went on the air on 2 May 1982. The channel reports the weather and other meteorological information for the US as well as other countries and regions of the world.

TWC originally gathered its national region forecasts from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and gathered its local forecasts from local National Weather Service offices, but since 2002 has done local forecasting in-house from Atlanta.

"We feel it is a very fair price," says Decker Anstrom, president of Landmark Communications, who called the sale a "bittersweet moment" for the privately owned family business. Initially derided for boring programming, TWC soon carved a niche in everyday American lives, culminating in a song dedicated to it by Sheryl Crow in 2002.