Satellite Radio Is Officially Here

dragons_flight writes: "XM Satellite Radio has officially launched, initially selling equipment only in the Dallas and San Diego markets, but going national by Nov. 15. A reciever for home or car costs ~$300 plus a $10/month subscription service. Many new cars will be pre-equipped with satellite-ready radios. XM provides 100 digital channels, a signicant number of which are commercial free. Sirius satellite radio says they are committed to launching be the end of the year." Any readers out there with the equipment for this have comments about it? ($10x12 + $300 makes $420 I'll be putting toward other things.)

Comments

Subscription Fee

[matthewg]

How do they enforce the subscription fee? Do they just make you send back the receiving equipment if you don't pay? If so, I predict that the DirecTV hackers will have a new toy to play with. ;)

Re:Subscription Fee

[Krellan]

Enforcing the subscription fee is a pretty easy problem to solve, assuming that each subscriber's radio has a unique serial number and that the channels of the satellite are encrypted with a modern encryption system (public key, and at least 128 bits).

There isn't enough bandwidth to send each subscriber an individually encrypted signal, of course. So, they encrypt the overall signal with their private key, and change this key fairly often. There is enough bandwidth to send individual public keys to each subscriber, though. These public keys are encrypted somehow with the serial number of the radio -- this is a second layer of encryption. The radio receiver, using its serial number and other stored information, decodes this. Returning to the first layer of encryption, it can now be decoded, because the radio now has the proper public key.

Suppose you don't pay? They simply remove your radio's serial number from the list of public keys that are transmitted. When they next change the private key, your radio never receives the new public key. The encrypted channels no longer decode correctly, and your radio goes dead.

Now the harder problems appear. What to do about cloned radios, where more than one unit shares the same serial number? What to do about hacked radios, "rogue clients" that share the decrypted public key with others, relieving them of the need to pay for it? How to hold subscribers accountable, when there is no reliable back channel? DirectTV has been wrestling with these problems for years. If digital radio catches on, expect to see Canadian stores selling cloning and reprogramming equipment... interesting times are ahead.

But it begs the question: Why bother?

[spiderfarmer]

I dunno, I've gotten so weary of commercial radio that I almost never listen to anything but CD's anyway. And remember when cable TV was introduced and the big motivation for paying for it was so that you got broadcasts without commercials? That didn't last too long...and now consumers can pay up to $100.00 a month for cable that consists of more advertising than is allowed by law on network channels.

So, I don't really believe the non-commercial aspect, at least not once they get a big enough subscriber base.

And reviewing the available channels, it seems to me that it would be easier and cheaper to just buy CD's. At $12.00 a pop for a new CD, you could buy 35 CD's of music you want to hear instead of constantly flipping through another 100 channels of crap.

10 bucks for this?

[Nf1nk]

From the Article

Besides music and talk programming, XM will also carry radio channels or live audio simulcasts from CNBC, CNN Headline News, USA Today and C-SPAN among others.

Of the music channels, 30 of 71 will be commercial-free. The rest, along with 29 news, talks and sports channels will carry commercial blocks of varying lengths.

The service will cost $9.95 a month, with new radios to upgrade older cars to make them compatible starting at $225.

so if I understand this right for ten bucks a month I only get 30 stations that are comercial free and 100 + that arn't any any different than what I already have.

excuse me if I don't run out grab one.

Buy it before they make it SSSCA compliant!

[Ghoser777]

I bet you could hack one of these things to instead of playing music to encoding to mp3 or ogg right on your hardrive. On normal radios, this is kind of pointless because the sound quality is so poor, but on fully digital music, this could be sweet. Hmmm, maybe that's what we'll have to start doing: hacking the hardware to be able export digital music, like CD's and such, to software. Mayeb I should switch from Math-Edu to CompE so I could make a bundle setting up something like this.

F-bacher

Re:i'll stick with mp3's

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Radio stations generally have more music storage space than your typical MP3 player (unless you can afford one of those 20gig hard drive based ones)

2. I listen to the radio to hear different kinds of music. I don't have hundreds of CDs or MP3s, so the same stuff tends to get old after a while.

Re:Yeah, I'll probably pass....

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Crutchfield started hawking satellite radio in their catalog, it certainly isn't marketed locally.

I don't know about the in-car MP3 player thing, some compatible CD decks are being made but I'm not seeing them available locally either. They might be interesting to try out but by default they assume the owner has a CD writer and I don't care to deal with the hassle.

Re:Not Buying It.

[spudnic]

You obviously only drive around a city.

I spend many hours in the car moving between clients. Most of the time there isn't a decent radio station in range. Music is fine, but hours on end will just drive you nuts.

I usually listen to talk radio when it's available and I'm sick of music for a bit. If it's late at night I'll spend all my time switching between AM stations to try and find Art Bell.

For someone like me, this would be a great value. I'm going to do it just as soon as it's available nationwide.

Just think if they ONLY got every long-haul truck driver to sign up, they would be pretty darn successful.

Orbits

[mangu]

...probably wouldn't work well in cars, and i'd always be getting interference from cloud cover and such...

The Sirius radio satellites will transmit directly to cars. They are in a specially designed orbit, with three regularly spaced satellites in an inclined orbit, which takes them very low over South America and high over North America. That way, there's always one satellite nearly overhead and moving slowly over the USA. Their control station is in Ecuador, where all three satellites are visible at all times. Unles you are in a tunnel, there should be no interference anywhere in the 48 contiguous US.

Re:Before you respond with 'Get an MP3 Player'

[drodver]

People who travel a lot by car for work/pleasure might like this. Some possible people who would like it: rural mail carriers/delivery people that use their own car, sales people who move all around the states, all those retired people with their RV's, semi-truck drivers etc. etc. So for you it might not be worth the money but others would probably love it.

When does the TiVo version come out?

[KFury]

Considering how small an mp3 stream is, it wouldn't be hard to capture the stream to a 128meg DIMM chip so you can precache stations.

Without commercials and without commentary, there's no disincentive to timeshifting digital satellite radio. Why not make a system that will cache the last 100 songs, so you can just skip the ones you don't like?

Why it's no good for me (& many others)

[maggard]

I commute almost weekly between work in Boston, Mass. USA & home in Montreal, Quebec Canada. It's about a 6-hour drive through mountains and with a very limited choice of stations, both FM and AM. As someone with a strong dislike of both religious programming and country music and with limited endurance for Delilah (an impossible-to-escape syndicated program) I'd be very interested in radio programming that I could receive uninterrupted en route.

My first choice would be for a live NPR feed though PRI and of course CBC would be welcome. All-music would be useful as an alternate though I'm really looking for something to keep me engaged on the long and at this hundredth-time boring night drive. Mp3's or other pre-recorded music aren't what I'm looking for (I already have a large collection of CD's & tapes) and so aren't interesting as an alternative. I could download some news & interview programming I like and burn it to a CD before each trip but this would be far more preparation then I care to do so regularly.

Unfortunately it appears that "satellite radio" will be as problematic for me as conventional radio. Driving through the mountains at ~45 North will likely result in service interruptions (doubtless the same as with conventional radio: always at the most interesting points.) Without much likelihood of repeaters in these rural areas this appears an inherent bug in the service and one which (at least for me) brings it from a strong possibility to something I'm not willing to pay much extra for.

A couple of tangential thoughts:

1. As Canada's CRTC takes no action to prevent piracy of US FCC-licensed satellite television broadcasts (aside from refusing to allow the services to be directly sold in Canada) I wonder if the same will hold true of radio broadcasts?
2. Is anyone aware of an online service where I could plug in a route (not a single location) and get a listing of stations by genre along the way? I imagine this would be a popular add-on to the many online route/map services but none seem to have anything like this. What I'd like to see would be something like a listing of public radio station by frequency along my route; others would presumably prefer country stations, pop or rock programming, etc.

Finally, Howstuffworks has a much more complete explanation of the history of this technology and how it really works (the corporate web sites are careful not to identify problems such as the need for repeaters.)

Re:Why it's no good for me (& many others)

[specialized_sworks]

From the HowStuffWorks site, the repeaters are for urban areas, not for mountainous areas. Not that Boston to Montreal is really "mountainous". Because of the urban canyons created by tall buildings, the satellite signals can be blocked. In wide open country the signal should be fine. Once you get back in the urban canyons of Montreal, you might run into signal issues.

XM vs DirecTV 800?

[4of12]

I've really enjoyed the piped music coming in on the channel 8?? range on DirecTV. It's commercial free, and they display the artist/title/CD/label on the screen for your information (which is more than I'll say about most FM stations that just assume you know).

But of course it's a stationary service, rooted to my home system.

It would be nice if I could just receive those same audio channels from DirecTV in my car, on my personal CD/MP3 player/tuner instead of having to subscribe to yet another service. The BW requirements seem minimal enough in principle but perhaps there's no convenient way of extracting just those channels from their feed with a dinky antennae?

Of course, another alternative might be if cell phone time comes down in price enough so that we can stream audio over the web via WAP(?)

The quality...

[rbruels]

What everyone is forgetting to mention is that with satellite radio, you are getting digital quality. Which means, many hundred times better than standard FM radio, infinitely better than AM radio, and for me, relativistically better (a new definition I will make up, defined as "infinitely better accelerated to nearly the speed of light") than sitting at home, downloading songs (which are somtimes downloaded just to find they're encoded badly), making playlists, and spending $2.00 on a quality music CD from Memorex.

The quality itself will also be higher than a CD typically, because:

a.) we're using CD-R(W) drives to burn them, not a professional disc mastering systems, and

b.) most of us are going from MP3 compression onto the CD, where we lose -- and people who complain you can't hear it don't have the same phat audio system I do <g> -- noticable quality.

Oh, and by the way -- my Alpine deck is XM-ready, so I can go home and make CDs/playlists/et. al if I want, and still plug into the XM system.

So, when XM reaches my area, SIGN ME UP! There will be some channels with commercials, aye, the new stuff that will be formatted like an FM station; but there will be tens of others that won't, rather like DirectTV's digital music stations.

Ryan

Re:Cassette deck?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately there's not all that much empty spectrum left. And if the airwaves were like the internet, you'd get 1000 crappy stations (geocities websites) wasting precious spectrum for every 1 decent station (Slashdot). And then there'd be the poorly run stations that bleed over into other stations' frequencies or just outright jam everything, either intentionally or through incompetence.

Some control of the airwaves is required. Making some part of the FM band open for private radio stations (and only audio radio stations. We don't need wireless ethernet or phones transmissions or anything else getting in the way like with the 2.4Ghz band) would be a good idea, as long as you need a license and approved hardware or something, so you're not screwing with other people's broadcasts.

Try it!

[r41nm4n]

Try it out at their web site. It seems to be broken right now, but it looks like they are trying to provide a trial service.

The service agreement

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice contradiction in this one:

Section 5. Payment
c) Administrative Fees
2. Late Fee
We do not extend credit to customers and this late fee is not an interest charge.

Compare with

Section 5. Payment
g) Consents Regarding Credit
In order to establish an account with us, you authorize us to inquire into your creditworthiness, by checking with credit reporting agencies. If you are delinquent in any payment to us, you also authorize us to report any late payment or nonpayment to credit reporting agencies.

I call bullshit. If you aren't extending me credit, you get no access to my credit history.

Everyone is missing the point!

[MtViewGuy]

I think everyone is seriously missing the point of XM satellite radio.

The problem with today's music radio stations is that they've been so market-researched to death that the only formats I hear commonly are Adult Contemporary, Country & Western, Hip-Hop and some Heavy Metal. They've essentially wiped out Classical, many ethnic formats, Easy Listening, and Jazz formats, just for starters.

The potential for XM is enormous: a lot of music formats we used to hear widely and/or niche format music heard only regionally can now get national distribution again. Imagine being able to listen to techno and dance music from Europe and Japan (great music few people in the USA hear)--XM could provide an outlet for that soon.

Re:Not going to work

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong on most points. FM radio is quivering in fear. The keynote address at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Radio Show in New Orleans three weeks ago mostly focused on satellite radio, but not for the reason you'd think. To be blunt, as originally conceived it doesn't work. The technical solution has been to augment the celestial transmissions with terrestrial rebroadcast transmitters euphemistically referred to as "gap fillers." FM gap fillers are typically low power, in the ten's to hundred watt range. Some of the satellite gap fillers dwarf the power of competing major market FM stations. It's the NAB's contention that satellite radio services are in fact terrestrial radio stations with satellite program distribution and, as such, don't adhere to their licenses and should be revoked.

Regarding DAB, it took well over a decade for FM to become popular. The earliest FM transmissions were mono, followed temporarily by left channel AM, right channel FM tuners. FM radio didn't really become dominant in the market until the mid-seventies in the U.S., ten years after that still in Canada. I was part of the first major DAB Canadian install in Toronto in the late nineties and now manage a site in Vancouver. Receiver chips are dropping in price monthly. Give DAB eight or nine more years before pronouncing it dead.