In one of the biggest private equity deals in the past year, privately held Landmark sold the 24-hour weather network, Weather.com and other weather-related businesses to New York-based NBC.
NBC Universal, which is part of General Electric, will add The Weather Channel to its other news and information businesses, which also include NBC News, MSNBC, CNBC and their affiliated websites.
It was one of a number of bidders for the Weather Channel with others including Time Warner CBS Corp and Comcast Corp all expressing interest.
NBC said it had no plans to move the company or make any specific changes and company bosses are expected to visit Weather Channel staff later this week.
The Weather Channel's Virginia-based owners, Landmark Communications, put the network up for sale in January and reports suggested the company initially wanted $5bn.
However, analysts said the original figure was probably planted by investors to get companies interested.
The chairman of Landmark, Frank Batten, said in a statement that he was proud of how far the network has come and that he knows under NBC "the Weather Channel and its employees will have increased opportunities for growth".
Landmark started the channel 26 years ago as a basic 24-hour all-weather cable service -- serving 120m people a month.
The channel is the third most distributed cable network and is viewable on more than 97% of cable television homes in the US. Its website has nearly 40m unique visitors per month.
Nicholas Heymann, an analyst for Sterne Agee & Leach, said that owning the Weather Channel will make NBC more attractive to buyers.
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