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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.)
It is hard to sell commercials without an existing user base. Once you have the customers, than you can zap them with ads.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Honestly, this could turn out to be worthwhile, *if* they provide stations that play a wide enough variety of music, and remain well-organized by music category. Having all music and no commercials/talk is a big plus. The big problem is that $10 monthly fee for the privilege of listening to a pre-determined playlist that you have no control over.
With the era of MP3 music upon us, I think many people will prefer to spend that $10 a month on blank media, and buy an in-car MP3 player (for roughly the same price as these satellite radios), and control what they listen to and when it's heard.
Satellite radio is a great concept, but I have a hard time seeing too many people subscribe under the current terms. The "itch" that this addresses (too many commercials, not enough variety) isn't severe enough to justify the $300 + $120/year. Especially not when cheaper "scratches" exist, like CD players. The audiophiles that I know are more likely to spend their money on MP3 and CD alternatives.
Maybe if they can get enough cars to come with the hardware preinstalled, they have a shot. But until they have that installed base of hardware, this service is a pilot project at best.
** The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employers - past, present, or future**
Instead of supporting this form of broadcast, why not send some money to your local public radio organizations instead? (Sorry to everyone else if this is largely a US idea.) They insulate you from the blatant and sickening commericialism. They don't ask you to install special equipment. They (usually) broadcast things which expand your mind and make you more informed. They do not just allows themselves to be swept along in every popular culture movement you can think of, etc.
In short, they don't ask for much, and they deliver quite a lot in return. It's an excellent investment. Please consider sending them the $420 instead.
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
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.
----I don't want to achieve immortality through my work... I want to achieve it through not dying.--
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.
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
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
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
if im going to spend 420, I'm going to smoke it too.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
Instead of supporting this form of broadcast, why not send some money to your local public radio organizations instead?... They insulate you from the blatant and sickening commericialism.
This is not, in fact, the case.
Listener donations are an important part of community radio, but corporate sponsorships also play a big (often a majority) role. The only difference between a sponsorship spot and an out-and-out ad is:
Apart from those, there is very little difference between the ads you hear on commercial radio and the spots you hear on public radio.
I worked for a community radio station in Charlottesville, VA called WNRN (91.9 -- still have my t-shirt). They started off with 4 breaks per hour -- :03, :20, :35 and :47 plus the top-of-the-hour station ID live/liner break (or something close to that -- it's been some years). During donation drives the number of breaks doubled.
By the time I moved out of Charlottesville this past year they had added I think 2 promo spots to the hour. You can't get enough on your calendar otherwise to support the station.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm not knocking community radio. I loved WNRN and the people who work there. But let's not talk about how public radio is "non-commercial" when that's simply not true.
-- Old Man Kensey
from the just-when-my-car-gets-a-decent-cassette-deck dept.
Jesus. What did you upgrade from, an 8-track?
C-X C-S
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.
I see a few repeated thoughts against subscription radio. Here's a some thoughts on why they're wrong.
:) Subscription-based media access works (cable TV, newspapers, magazines), despite the wide variety of high-quality, free sources (network TV, indie 'zines).
Anti-1) Just buy CDs.
At $10/mo. you can't even buy one CD/mo. Assuming good playlists, this is a cheaper way to get a variety of music. As for the $300 one-time cost for the radio, that will come down. CD players debuted at $500 - $1000 (?? just buy blank tapes at $0.50 ea.!); likewise for VCRs, DVD players, etc.
Anti-2) Listen CDs for good selection; don't rely on radio.
CDs play for 70 min max. Then it either stops, repeats, or you must switch discs. The point of radio is fire-and-forget. Pick station, and not have to interrupt work to fiddle with music selection. Multi-discs CD players reduce the problem, but don't remove it.
Anti-3) Use MP3 player to play large compilation discs.
Like Anti-2, it reduces effort, but still requires effort (both up-front to make the MP3s, and possibly to switch discs). But it's also Anti-1 -- you gotta have discs before you can rip 'em. Unless you steal music, but that's another discussion.
Anti-4) Just make your own mixes, and listent ot them. Why listen to corporate-run radio?
Uh huh. Just like you make your own DVD mixes, rather than getting cable-TV for movies, news, variety, etc.
For many of those people, the objections will be sufficient deterrent to trying digital radio. But early adopters are funny beasts, and are not easily stopped
There are many obstacles, but I think subscription, digital radio could work.
ShoutingMan.com
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?
Kevin Fox
Thankfully the Bay has one truly Public Radio station, KKUP. None of the DJ's are played, they have 15+ genres, and are 100% listener supported (quite possibly the only station in the country). Not that I would bet too many /.'ers are big reggae fans, but they have the most reggae hours on radio period. (XM just happens to have 1 reggae station I am streaming right now)
A point on XM radio, the trucking industry will be the first to take great use of this, on a trip to Mardi Gras from Indiana with my father, I failed to bring anything to read with me, and picked up all the free trucking magazines I could at local gas stations, and they were looking forward to XM in great force. It also interested me the amount of trucking companies who provided e-mail services built into their rigs to their employees so they could keep in touch with both their dispatchers and families.
Always remember not 'ALL' tech is created by geeks for geeks....
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:
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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?
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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.)I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
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(?)
"Provided by the management for your protection."
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.