Satellite Radio: Tune In or Turn Off?

Steve MacLaughlin writes: "After nearly a decade of buildup and anticipation satellite radio has finally hit the airwaves. By now you've probably seen a commercial or read an article about the digital satellite radio service. But what is behind all the hype? And does satellite radio have a viable future? To answer those questions Saltire decided to take an in-depth look at the new service's inner-workings, its potential, and its possible future." Read on for more of Steve's look at the current options and future possibilities for satellite radio service.

Satellite radio has been a technology in the making for many years now. In 1992, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) assigned part of the S-band (2.3 GHz) spectrum for nationwide broadcasting of a satellite-based Digital Audio Radio Service (DARS). In 1997, the FCC granted American Mobile Radio (now XM Satellite Radio) and CD Radio (now Sirius Satellite Radio) broadcast rights over that band. After several years of tinkering, courting investors and partners, and lining up their content these two companies are poised to finally make satellite radio a reality.

The Players
XM Satellite Radio (NASDQ: XMSR) and Sirius Satellite Radio (NASDQ: SIRI) paid an estimated $80 million each for their exclusive distribution rights to satellite radio. With numerous industry partners and investors these two companies are hoping to become the next giants of the media world.

Washington, D.C. based XM Radio launched nationwide service on November 12, 2001, after two months of regional service. XM Radio currently offers 100 channels (71 music and 29 news, sports, talk, and children's programming). XM Radio has exclusive content relationships with C/NET, NASCAR, and others. XM Radio's most notable auto industry partner is General Motors. Cadillac now offers XM Radio standard on all new 2002 Sevilles and Devilles. XM Radio's service is available for a monthly subscription fee of $9.99.

New York City based Sirius Radio plans to launch their service in Denver, Houston, and Phoenix on February 14, 2002. A Sirius Radio spokesperson told Saltire that their service will be available nationwide by the third-quarter of 2002. Sirius Radio also offers 100 channels (60 commercial-free music and 40 news, sports, talk, and entertainment programming). Sirius Radio has exclusive content relationships with NPR, Hispanic Radio Network, and National Lampoon. Sirius Radio also has exclusive partnerships with DaimlerChrysler, Ford, and BMW. Sirius Radio's service is available for a monthly subscription fee of $12.95.

Although XM Radio and Sirius Radio have their distinct differences there are however some things that that they both share in common. Both services offer similar music channel genres. The big difference being that all of Sirius Radio's music channels are commercial-free as opposed to only about 30 such channels on XM Radio. Both services also share several news and entertainment providers like Bloomberg, CNBC, CNN, ESPN, and the Weather Channel.

XM Radio and Sirius Radio have also partnered with many of the same manufacturing partners including Alpine, Clarion, Delphi Delco, Panasonic, Pioneer, Sony, and Visteon. One very exciting product is Sony's "Plug and Play" DRN-XM01 model that works in both your car and home stereo system through the use of a $150 adapter kit. The two companies have also teamed up with similar retailers to help distribute satellite radio receivers, antennas, and other devices. These retailers include Best Buy, Circuit City, Crutchfield, Good Guys, and Tweeter.

Just The Facts
According to the Radio Advertising Bureau, 75% of all Americans age 12 and up listen to radio daily, and 95% listen every week. But their choices are almost always very limited. Consider the fact that more than 22 million listeners receive fewer than five FM stations, and the communications industry firm Veronis, Suhler & Associates noted that 50% of all existing radio stations only use one of three programming formats (Adult Contemporary, Country, and News/Talk/Sports).

In many cases, huge segments of the music industry get little or no coverage by mainstream radio. One study indicated that up to 21% of annual music sales come from these totally ignored formats. This is especially true of ethnic music formats like African, Asian, Caribbean, or Hispanic. Combine this with the fact that more than 105 million listeners live outside the 50 largest radio markets and you quickly realize satellite radio's potential appeal.

Too Much Information
XM Radio uses two Boeing HS-702 satellites that are positioned over the East and West Coasts of the United States. The satellites, aptly named "Rock" and "Roll", maintain a geostationary orbit at 22,000 miles above the earth. XM Radio has a third back-up satellite on the ground should something go wrong in orbit.

Sirius Radio uses three Space Systems/Loral 1300 satellites in a high altitude elliptical orbit. Sirius Radio contends that this ensures that each satellite will spend about 16 hours a day over the U.S., and that at least one satellite is over the country at all times. Sirius Radio also has a back-up satellite standing by just in case of problems.

Both companies transmit their signal on the S-band, at 12.5 MHz to radio receivers on the ground. Sirius Radio will use the in the 2320.0 to 2332.5 MHz frequency band. XM Radio already uses the 2332.5 to 2345.0 MHz frequency band. They will also use repeaters in urban areas where buildings and other obstructions may interfere with signal reception.

One On One
Saltire interviewed Chance Patterson, XM Radio's Vice President of Corporate Affairs, to get his take on satellite radio.

• Saltire - What are some of the key differences between XM Radio and Sirius Radio?
  CP - The biggest difference is that we have a fully developed and deployed system. We have a proven product that's great, and we developed the system with a retail focus, not just limited to the car. But we're not just an audio service. We've recruited the best people in the industry. These people really make our content come alive.

  Saltire - What will it take for XM Radio to succeed financially?
  CP - We figure that we need 4.5 million subscribers to be profitable. There are more than 200 million registered vehicles in the United States. So we need less than 2.5% of all cars to reach that figure. And this doesn't take into account people who only use it in the home. We think the demand is definitely there.

  Saltire - How important is the auto industry to XM Radio's success?
  CP - They are a part of it for sure. We have a full OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) system. We have partnered with GM, and they are also an investor. Right now Cadillac models already have the system. Over the next year more than 20 GM models will have factory-installed units.

  Saltire - What does satellite radio mean for listeners?
  CP - People are spending more time in their cars and they want to be informed, and they want to enjoy that time a little more. XM can do that. If you're listening to the reggae channel you should feel like you're in Jamaica. It's really point-of-view radio.

  Saltire - What does satellite radio mean for traditional radio?
  CP - XM doesn't disenfranchise AM/FM. Terrestrial radio will be forced to get better. Talk to the audience like they're older than 12 year olds. Talk to me about the music. Talk to me about the world when [the song] was written. That's what listeners really want.

  Saltire - But will people really pay for satellite radio?
  CP - People said they'd never pay for cable television because TV was something they already got for free. Look at how that turned out. We're going to do the same thing for radio. The difference is that we already have all of the infrastructure. The one-millionth subscriber doesn't cost more than the first one. We'll offer better quality, less commercials, and more choice. We believe people will pay for their passions.

Word On The Street
Saltire solicited the unfettered opinions of individuals in the technology, radio, and automotive industry.

• What do you think satellite radio means for advertisers?
  "I think it can potentially be very good for advertisers. Specifically, by dividing the content available into so many categories, advertisers can probably make better assumptions about demographics. For example, XM Radio offers a dedicated NASCAR channel, dedicated BlueGrass channel, etc. The targeting is more granular than conventional radio where most stations do a little of everything, music, news, weather, traffic, etc. This should translate to more effective advertising potential for advertisers. That said, some of us are and will be willing to pay for commercial free options - I sure am." - Jason Foodman, technologist and Vice President of Business Development, Aladdin Systems

  Why do you think satellite radio has the potential to be a big success?
  "Abetted by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that relaxed ownership restrictions and made possible the creation of media behemoths, conventional radio programmers unwittingly sabotaged their own stations through pernicious cost-saving programming trends such as corporate-level programming, format duplication and computer automation. The result: bland, boring, sound-alike radio stations from town to town, up and down the dial all across America, which drive away listeners in droves. That's good for satellite radio services like XM and, soon, Sirius, since listeners may eventually find their way to satellite radio." - Michael Saffran, radio industry veteran and Senior News Specialist, Rochester Institute of Technology

  What does the auto industry really think about satellite radio?
  "Everybody in the automotive/telematics value chain is excited about it. Well, maybe not everybody, but I've just been doing some interviews on a satellite based telematics project, and everybody I've talked to at OEMs, Tier 1 suppliers, cellular carriers, really likes the idea of satellite radio. I get the feeling they want this to work, if only because it lets them get a foot in the car door with subscription-based services." - Thomas R. Elliott, Vice President of North American Consulting, Strategy Analytics, Inc.

The Bottom Line
Both XM Radio and Sirius Radio agree that the market is big enough for two players. But as both services ramp up they need to find a way to stay in business. XM Radio recently reported a third-quarter '01 net loss of $70.8 million. Sirius Radio reported a net loss of $57 million for the same time period. XM Radio just announced financing to operate its business into the fourth-quarter of 2002. Sirius Radio has also publicly announced that they have enough cash to last until the fourth-quarter of 2002.

To succeed both companies will need the support of the auto industry, and quickly. Getting satellite radios installed as standard equipment will help to build their subscriber base. The current $300 to $400 conversion cost might be a bit too steep for most consumers. Also, current receivers only support a single format (XM or Sirius). Future AM/FM/XM/SR models should also help boost more widespread usage.

Finally, there is enough content overlap to keep subscribers to either service happy. Perhaps the biggest decision is whether or not you want ads with your music. Sirius Radio's commercial-free music service can be yours for just $3 more each month than what XM Radio charges. The immense variety of music and other content should be a big hit if consumers can just find an easy way to get their hands on the technology. And reports of its CD-quality audio can only help to increase satellite radio's popularity. I'm still waiting to hear it for myself. Stay tuned.

Comments

Who cares?

[vought]

With in-car MP3, XM and Sirius are headed for the same landfill that Iridium and Ricochet are in, namely, great technology that solves no problems.

What a waste!

Now if someone could just get my trash bin to the street on Wednesday mornings without my involvement...that would be weinning technology.

Re:Who cares?

[mancuskc]

You are completely correct.

The whole world has NEVER paid for radio - (well, except indirectly through the TV license in the UK) If advertising revenue can't support it, like terestrial radio, it's dead in the water.

Re:Who cares?

[Cy Guy]

With in-car MP3,

I would extend that thought to include wireless access to IP, and therefore eventual ability to have nonstop streaming of any mulitmedia content on the web coming from your car's dashboard.

When you can instantly access any song ever recorded, why would you still pay to subscribe to a service that only gives 100 streams where someone else is picking the songs?

Of course it will be long time before that is a realistic option in places like Montana. So for those areas, MP3 is a great option if you don't mind doing the downloads yourself, otherwise it might be worth $10/month to have someone else choosing your playlist for you.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

You couldn't be more wrong. I think that the analogy to cable television is right on. Your MP3 collection is static and it is something that you have to maintain. Why not sign up for something dynamic, fresh, and engaging?

Re:Who cares?

[copec]

I'm willing to pay $10 a month compared to the crap we get around here... I like just turning on and listening to the radio when its not crap.

I think alot of people feal the same way as well, I have alot of mp3's, but yet I still like to listen to the radio.

Re:Who cares?

[McD!ck]

I only wish that normal radio were headed to that landfill! I HATE homogenized radio!

"And now back to N-SYNC, Britney, and other people who can't play a real instrument if we held a gun to their head, on Star. Don't worry, we won't play anything that might make you think."

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dynamic, fresh and engaging?

Where does your cable come from? Mine always seems to be filled with crap...

Re:Who cares?

[amccall]

Truck Drivers, Audiophiles, "Gadget People", people who like to drive cross country(or need to).

I spend roughly 1 and a half hours in the car each day. Listening to a single set of mp3s, even a large one, can get tedious.

Then there is talk radio, which I imagine is going to be a large application of this thing. 24 hour Rush Limbaugh Marathons(...what joy...), still I imagined listened too. More selection, less trouble dealing with media/mp3's. Station not playing what you like, pick another. Then there is news, traffic reports(I don't know about localization, but I imagine it's possible), weather, and such - which just can't be taken with you.

Anyway, just because you don't see applications, doesn't mean that noone is going to buy it. Remember, people still listen to radio, not just CD's.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would hardly call these services "great technolog[ies] that solves no problems." These firms are trying to bring good audio content into a consumer electronics device. Free radio in my town sucks, and I already pay to listen to music (CD's and cable modem for other formats).

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

"
With in-car MP3, XM and Sirius are headed for the
same landfill that Iridium and Ricochet are in,
namely, great technology that solves no problems.
"

The problem with that statement is, how are you ever going to find anything new? Eventually, you'll get bored of the same old same old. There's another
response to this message to the effect that wireless ip
could fix this, but the range of it is too low at this point.

Re:Who cares?

[Squareball]

"And now here is the latest from RAGE AGAINST THE KORN BIZKIT!" ;)

Re:Who cares?

[squiggleslash]

Britain used to have a radio licence - until the late sixties - which ultimately was a subscription to BBC radio (there were no other radio operators.) So people in Britain did, indeed, pay for radio directly rather than indirectly through higher priced groceries, etc.

Note too that until the advent of cable TV, "the whole world" (except Britain) had "NEVER paid for TV". Cable changed that.

Given a choice between indirectly and directly funded radio I can't say I know whether enough consumers would choose the latter, especially if it requires special equipment. But given time, and given radios that have the additional functionality built in, that may be a matter of time.

Re:Who cares?

[tomzyk]

Now if someone could just get my trash bin to the street on Wednesday mornings without my involvement...that would be weinning technology.

That's already offered: Maid Service. Subscription based. And not only will it get your trash can out to the street, it'll pick the trash that isn't even IN your trash can and get it to the street!

Re:Who cares?

[sporty]

I agree with you whole-heartedly. Just wish to further what you said.

Advice about the mp3 thing, get a bigger collection ;)

But seriously, just so long as we can maintain regional advertising or local stations, I'll be happy. Last thing I want to hear is an MS Commercial or a McDonald's Commercial in NYC. If there's a special event in the area, I'd like to hear about it as well.

Re:Who cares?

[RussGarrett]

When you can instantly access any song ever recorded, why would you still pay to subscribe to a service that only gives 100 streams where someone else is picking the songs?

Of course. The thing is, you may have access to every song ever recorded, but you don't know which ones you like, which you enjoy, and which aren't worth your bandwidth. That's what radio is for. MP3 won't supercede radio, because they're completely different media.

Re:Who cares?

[zulux]

headed for the same landfill that Iridium and Ricochet

Iridium is not dead. The DOD has a $70 million contract with the small Canadian firm that purchased the scraps after their bankrupcy. Buy a $1000 Motorola 9505 phone and each minute is now $1.50 form anywhere in the world to anywhere in the world. It use to cost ~$10 a minute. The DOD contract let them make a profit - so they sould be around for a while.

I use mine in Europe and Japan - it's cheaper than GSM roaming, and the incomming caller pays the $1.50, not me. It's also great for backbacking - I can pretend that I'm still at the server farm on Fridays.

Re:Who cares?

[spamkabuki]

I think an important market for satellite radio will be immigrants to the US. just as an example, is there a good Chinese, Russian, Hindi, or Portuguese language broadcast station in your area? Probably not. Are there a lot of people in the US who speak these languages as their mother tongue? Sure. I bet plenty of these people would appreciate being able to pick up syndicated news/talk/music from home.

Just capturing part of that market will set set satellite radio well on its way to the customer volume it needs for viability. These may seem like niche markets, but the cost to provide services like these should be low. The volume will make the receivers cheap, then the market will grow.

Re:Who cares?

[mojotooth]

Yeah, in-car mp3 systems are great. Provided you never listen to any new music.

One of the BEST way I've found to get exposed to new and interesting music is to listen to either MusicChoice (if you're a DirecTV subscriber) or Digital Music Xpress if you're a cable owner. Now there's only 30-40 channels on the consumer package for these services, but they're still much more interesting and varied than traditional radio.

And of course you have access to neither of those services while in your car.

So now, with XMRadio and Sirius, you have 70+ channels of genre-based music, and if their programmers are worth their salt, you'll hear something new and pleasing every day. That's something that just won't happen with mp3s.

Re:Who cares?

[b0r1s]

Switch to AM.

If you're listening to Star (I'm assuming it's the same star I know of in LA), you might like some of the shows on KFI (am 640).

Definitely worth catching is weekdays, 7-10pm, the Phil Hendrie show (nationally syndicated, check your local listings kids!). By far one of the most intelligent, but hysterical, shows I've ever witnessed. Phil (the host) calls his own show, with a fake name/voice/character, and he proceeds to interview this fake character. What makes it hilarious is the characters are all incredibly stupid or offensive... A summary (from philhendrieshow.com ) is below:

Phil and the Orange County Courier entertainment reporter Doug Danger chat about the "predicted" success of the recently released film, Oceans 11. Mr. Danger points out to Phil and the listeners that in the previous week, he had wrote in his movie review column that the remake of the Sinatra classic would "clear the stench" left by the popular children's film Harry Potter. Doug went on to express his frustration with the fact that "because he's a GAY MAN & a GAY JOURNALIST" that the folks in charge of publicity failed to use his prediction in the advertising of Oceans 11! The listeners have a problem with Dougs statement and try to explain that maybe him being an egotistical no talent hack could be the reason his review wasn't used but Doug is adamint on the fact that his sexuality made people nervous and nobody likes it when a "GAY MAN & A GAY JOURNALIST" is right!!!

PLUS:
On the "Point of View" segment of the show, Phil talks with Dave Oliva, a law enforcement student at L.A. Mission College, regarding Americas role in the upcoming Winter Olympics. Daves "point of view" is that The United States has "had its ass handed to itself" in most of the winter games and with all that's going on in the world (you know...The stuff with Afghanistan)America should bow out of the Olympics this year. Phil agrees with Dave that yea maybe we ain't the best in the winter sports but we are hosting them this year so bowing out probably isn't a good idea. But Dave looks at our "lack luster" performance as ammo for guys like Osama bin Laden to use against America..."With all that's going on, we as Americans can't afford to look like Finlands Bitch!"

Re:Who cares?

[FatRatBastard]

So people in Britain did, indeed, pay for radio directly rather than indirectly through higher priced groceries, etc.

And the people in Britian have never been very happy paying either. It was a tax, you had to pay it (or prove you didn't own a radio, or TV now).

Now, I won't go into an arguement about the quality of Auntie Beeb's programming (I think its top notch, sans maybe the Archers) and if they cut the free web broadcasts would probably pay for thier service, but that's a different story.

People in Britain pay for broadcasts (be it radio or TV) because they have to by law (call it what you want, it is essentially a tax).

Re:Who cares?

[Triv]

Well, what if you're musical taste isn't limited to what you already know and love? MP3's are great and all, but the random element of radio in appealing. I think music now (mainstream music, that is) is a wasteland. I'd love to tune in to satellite radio station with the kind of music I like in the hopes of finding something new that, for whatever reason, wouldn't survive on traditional radio.

Triv

Re:Who cares?

[Jeriko1]

hopefully most people won't have the same opinion as you. people that really enjoy listening to music all the time (home or car) would probably be really into this (i would). sat-radio would be a great shakup to the sh*tty commercial radio corps out there. i think many people would rather pay $10/mo for a ton of music rather than pay $40/mo for crappy cable tv. this also could be great way to open up the music industry and give more artists airtime. this could be the equivilant (well maybe not quite) of college radio but distributed to the masses who aren't living in a city.

Re:Who cares?

[squiggleslash]

And the people in Britian have never been very happy paying either. It was a tax, you had to pay it (or prove you didn't own a radio, or TV now).

Support for the TV licence goes up and down, and usually (though not recently, but the BBC has gone downhill over the last 10 years) is easily the majority.

It isn't a tax. Taxation raises money for government.

And the onus has always been on the collector to prove you have the necessary equipment. Britain has the usual laws of "innocence presumed until proven guilty", and they apply here too.

People in Britain pay for broadcasts (be it radio or TV) because they have to by law

No, people in Britain paid for radio broadcasts because they wanted to receive them. If you didn't want to receive radio, you didn't have to pay a penny. Which brings us back to the original point.

Re:Who cares?

[mentin]

With in-car MP3 XM and Sirius are ... great technology that solves no problems

There are people (like me) who like to listen to something that they did not know before, like new artist that I never heard of (so it is not in my MP3 collection), or an interesting opinion on NPR, so on. MP3 is just static set of data, you will never get anything new there. MP3 will never completely replace radio, it will only replace your CD-player.

Re:Who cares?

[FatRatBastard]

It isn't a tax. Taxation raises money for government.

My point was that while it isn't a tax in name, it is essentially a tax. If you own a TV, you have to pay it. You cannot claim "Hey, I just watch ITV" and get out of paying. Thus, I find it more akin to a property tax than simply a subscription fee.

No, people in Britain paid for radio broadcasts because they wanted to receive them. If you didn't want to receive radio, you didn't have to pay a penny. Which brings us back to the original point.

Again, not quite. My understanding is the money you pay goes to the BBC, which is a gov't entity. (I honestly don't know if any TV licence goes to ITV or not). It is not analagous to Cable. If I don't want to watch cable, I do not pay cable rates, I don't get access to cable programming. On the other hand even if I do not want to watch the BBC by simply owning a TV I still have to pay the TV licence.

Again, this is more akin to a property tax than a subscription service.

Re:Who cares?

[curunir]

true...but you'd also have access to every shoutcast stream available on the net...which is exactly the same media.

Re:Who cares?

[Hee Hee Hee]

Hey, hold on now... Richochet solves the problem of providing cheap bandwidth for those of us in rural areas with no cable TV access, and who live too far from a Telco switch for DSL. Don't lump it in with Iridium.

Re:Who cares?

[CaseyB]

That's something that just won't happen with mp3s.

Shoutcast is MP3, and it offers the same sort of exposure.

But I agree with your main point, that it's important to listen to music that isn't all of your own personal choosing. I'm happy to let someone that has more time to sample everything that is available suggest what I listen to sometimes.

Re:Who cares?

[homebru]

...great technology that solves no problems.

And, thus, an idea that will ultimately fail.

As someone else around here says (paraphrasing) "Just cause you can doesn't mean you should".

Or, as I prefer it, "Revolutions do not succeed because they are technically possible; they succeed when the old ways no longer work".

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Will the stations be localized at all? For some reason people like to hear things like "Hey this is DJ DogFace down at the Ninja Club on Park St having a good ole time! YYYYEAAHHH!! Come on down to where the party is at! We are giving away FREE WXYZ bumper stickers and hoola hoops!!!!"

It doesn't attract me, but people listen.

Re:Who cares?

[Aztech]

"And the people in Britian have never been very happy paying either. It was a tax, you had to pay it (or prove you didn't own a radio, or TV now)."

I wouldn't say that, the annual ~$160 (tv) licence fee isn't exactly worth taking to the streets in protest, I'm sitting here quite happily listening to BBC Radio 1 on my digital terrestrial radio (aka DAB). The BBC have been running Digital Radio broadcasts since 1995, their R&D dept is well aknowledged. Most people are quite content, if it ain't broke and all that.

However, I'm not sure whether I'd pay for commercial radio, it would absolutely have to be a cut above the rest and carry no adverts or sponsorship (like the BBC). I heard XM is only using 64kbps datarates for its stereo service, I wouldn't fancy that. I know one company in the UK is having problems trying to persuade people to subscribe to Digital Terrestrial TV, but that's mainly because the SkyDigital people have wiped the floor with them.

Re:Who cares?

[rhaig]

now if they could take the satelite radio system and rig it up to do IP for your VAN (vehicle area network) or remote areas where even dial-up would be costly, then they might have a product. But data rates would be low probably.

Re:Who cares?

[squiggleslash]

Thus, I find it more akin to a property tax than simply a subscription fee.

Property taxes do not get paid to independent entities though.

Again, not quite. My understanding is the money you pay goes to the BBC, which is a gov't entity. (I honestly don't know if any TV licence goes to ITV or not).

The BBC is not a government entity, the government's sole involvement at all is it had the right to appoint members of a group of governors, who are chosen apolitically. The BBC's independence is considered important.

Nor do I really see the relevence to my comment. The fact is that people who wanted radio up until the late 60s in Britain PAID THE BBC TO PROVIDE IT FOR THEM. They paid money which went directly to the BBC, nothing was taken by government, nothing was given to any other organisation. Further, IF THEY DIDN'T WANT TO PAY IT, they didn't have to, but they wouldn't be allowed to receive radio either.

And that is the bottom line. The assertion is being made that nobody has voluntarily paid for radio. That is not true. Until the late 60s, people in Britain who wanted to receive the BBC paid the BBC for the right to do so.

On the other hand even if I do not want to watch the BBC by simply owning a TV I still have to pay the TV licence.

Completely irrelevent. This is about the British Radio licence, not about the TV licence. And the radio licence was abolished once non-BBC radio channels became available in the UK.

Re:Who cares?

[FatRatBastard]

I wouldn't say that, the annual ~$160 (tv) licence fee isn't exactly worth taking to the streets in protest.

I wasn't claiming that they were rioting in the streets, but everyone I knew always had a grumble about it.

Now, I agree (like I said above) that the $160 pays for some damn good programming (both TV and Radio). I've always like the Beeb (and stream it here in the states). But that's beside the point. I was simply saying you couldn't equate people in Britian paying for TV (and Radio) because, for all intents and purposes they have to, with people signing up for XM Radio here in the states.

Re:Who cares?

[4mn0t1337]

I can be rather a news junkie at times, and am looking into SatRadio for that.

Sure you can carry a ton of MP3's with you and get all of the music you need. But, pre-recording a bunch of news shows doesn't get you too far. (They tend to get old after you hear them a few times.)

Of course the two things I would want to listen to, NPR and FoxNews (I like to hear differnt sides of the same stories) are each on the competing SatRadio service. That's kinda screwed.

But, I can't tell you how great this is for long drives. Even driving through SoCal for an hour, and I have to change radio stations, usually in the middle of somethign interesting. And that is just on an hour drive.

It gets worse the further you get from a big market. On time, some years ago, driving thru a state that will remain nameless, I was able to pick up 5 different sations in the middle of nowhere (which was a fairly high number). 4 out of the 5 stations, I kid you not on this, were playing that Achy-Breaky Heart crap. I'm sure the 5th DJ was just queuing up the record.

SatRadio would be perfect for avoiding this.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh.... how delightful. Do you shill here often?

Re:Who cares?

[amuro98]

I do see one market for satellite radio...

If I spent a lot of my time driving from one side of the country to the other (eg. truck driver) the ability to listen to the same station(s) regardless of where I was located would be a plus.

Yeah, yeah, "what about a 100GB HD with MP3s?" Well, what about things like news? What, you think I'll just rip NPR to mp3 and pick up a disk next time I'm home? MP3 may be nice, but there are problems MP3 can't solve.

Re:Who cares?

[Aztech]

Well generally a tax is basically for wealth redistribution or universal service provision, the TV licence isn't quite like that, you're not paying for the roads or the NHS etc, the licence pays for the BBC and that's it, call it an enforced subscription if you will.

"I honestly don't know if any TV licence goes to ITV or not"

ITV certainly have to pay dues for their broadcasting rights, I think this money goes to HM Treasury not the BBC, but it probably goes toward paying for the World Service grant in aid.

The inconsistencies you point out are valid, but considering the BBC was the first broadcaster (in the world?) if you bought a radio/tv years ago it was asumed you were buying it to watch the BBC since there was nothing else. The system dates back to the 20's and is a little archaic, but it works, since all the signals (including the digital mux) are Free-To-Air how could they serious administer a system if people could just come along and say "I only watch ITV".

For £120 it's not worth the trouble, even if you don't watch the BBC you have to remember it keeps the commercial broadcasters in check, which is why we don't have adverts every 5 minutes like some countries.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

"My understanding is the money you pay goes to the BBC, which is a gov't entity."

It certainly isn't, it's a public service owned by us, the whole reason we have a licence is to abstract the BBC from any government involvement. The licence means the BBC can obtain it's money independently of the governments political whims.

Re:Who cares?

[Psx29]

What about sattelite internet using the same principals as the sattelite radio? You could listen to streaming shoutcast/icecast mp3 streams that would sound just as good to some people. Plus you get the internet so you can do a lot more with this then just listening to music!

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

They have a licence fee in Singapore btw, but like most Sigapore government things it's enforced with some rigor.

Re:Who cares?

[Guillaume Ross]

Are you saying RATM or Korn can't play their instruments? I surely agree for Limp dickits though...

Re:Who cares?

[FatRatBastard]

The BBC is not a government entity

You're right, I stand corrected.. but...

the government's sole involvement at all is it had the right to appoint members of a group of governors, who are chosen apolitically. The BBC's independence is considered important.

And I argue that the Beeb is closer to the Gov't than most independent companies. They held the exclusive rights to broadcasting in England until about 40 years ago. On paper it may be independent, but for the sake of what we're taking about its a lot closer to its gov't than the likes of XM Radio.

This is about the British Radio licence, not about the TV licence.

True, but its still analogous to the system for radio 40 years ago, except now they never got rid of the TV license when they allowed independent TV into the market. The British pay the TV license for the same reasons they paid for Radio: as you said IF THEY DIDN'T WANT TO PAY IT, they didn't have to, but they wouldn't be allowed to receive radio either. They lose the right to own a radio outright. You may technically have a choice, but for all intents and purposes unless you want to live in a cave you pay. It is similar today. You don't pay the license, you can't own a TV, regardless of whether you watch BBC or not.

And the radio licence was abolished once non-BBC radio channels became available in the UK.

In which lies the problem. The BBC had a monopoly on radio broadcast. You either pay and listen to any radio (even if you wanted to listen to foreign stations from across the channel) or you didn't pay and listened to nothing. Yup, I was wrong calling it a tax (I always thought it was. The damn bill showed up and the gov't would throw you in the clink if you didn't pay) but for all intents and purposes it was. Own a radio, pay the licensing fee. Sure, you're paying for the BBC's content, but by gov't mandate it was the only content you could receive from British soil. Not exactly the most free of markets.

Which was my point. People in the UK didn't pay for a radio license for the same reasons that people are going to pay for XM radio here. There, the only choice was either pay the license or lose the right to hear ANY radio (which was the prominent means of mass communications of the time).

Re:Who cares?

[FatRatBastard]

Yeah, I got that one wrong, although its still a lot cosier to the Gov't than the likes of ITV or networks here in the States.

Re:Who cares?

[Aztech]

"I wasn't claiming that they were rioting in the streets, but everyone I knew always had a grumble about it."

It pales in significance compared to the grumble I have everytime I see my National Insurance and income tax deductions, don't get me wrong, nobody likes paying taxes but that's how society functions. Unfortunately, I can readily waste $160 on absolute crap so the licence probably does me a favour :)

I agree, XM isn't comparable the BBC, the BBC is a non-profit public service with commitments plainly set out in its charter, XM is a commercial company whose aim is to extract money from its subscribers for the benefit of its shareholders, and like any commercial company, quite rightly too.

There's no guarantee they won't pack their content full of adverts and cut budgets on content production once a certain critical mass of subscribers has been achieved, which is basically the magazine model. It may get the the stage where, apart from countrywide availability, it's no better than tradition commercial radio yet you also have the privilege of paying for it.

With SkyTV (Murdoch owned)in UK you pay a handsome subscription fee yet they also have the audacity to run adverts, not excessively so, but it's not really fair play. It's not really a good path to go down, considering they could have you by the short and curlies in a few years, if they don't already.

Re:Who cares?

[jeavis]

vought wrote:

With in-car MP3, XM and Sirius are headed for the same landfill that Iridium and Ricochet are in, namely, great technology that solves no problems. What a waste!

Perhaps, if your radio use is limited to music. I'm a talk radio junkie, and the area I live and work in is small enough that there aren't many radio options. The nearest NPR station is a small FM station 100 miles away, and reception is poor. People around here couldn't even pick up the World Series this year because the one sports radio station in town doesn't have an agreement with ESPN Radio. As you point out, it's not for everyone, but it sucks less than nothing at all.

Re:Who cares?

[glitch!]

I use mine [Iridium] in Europe and Japan - it's cheaper than GSM roaming, and the incomming caller pays the $1.50, not me.

Cool! Now all you have to do is make sure telemarketers get your number :-)

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd say the networks in the states are very politically aligned, the boards views are indirectly expressed through the news networks.

Being aligned to a political party is probably worse than being aligned to the government.

Re:Who cares?

[stilwebm]

As an employee of a publishing company responsible for a magazine that is aimed at truckers, I can confirm the truckers are excited about satellite radio. Not only is XM a big advertiser in the trucking industry, but they have partnerships with several long-haul truck manufacturers for built-in XM receivers. I also understand the marine industry is seeing some of the action. The response at truck shows seems to be pretty strong. Some people are point out that many truckers will may not be willing to spend an extra $10 of their already limited discretionary income. But those who have driven for years say it is worth $0.30 per day when driving between cities.

Re:Who cares?

[drsquare]

The BBC is no better than ITV or Channel 4, if not worse. Now they don't have Match of the Day, the only thing worth watching is the Simpsons. And it's not worth £110 a year just so there's no adverts in the middle of it.

Re:Who cares?

[bobKali]

I think it's well worth it. Look at the difference in the quality of programming between pay TV services like HBO verses the crap they put on NBC, CBS, etc... The reason (I believe) is that the programs are geared towards the people who pay for them.
For "free" tv and radio the "product" is not the content - it is the listeners who are being sold to the advertisers which is why the shows/ music/ etc.... is all so bland to appeal to the widest audiance possible - and everyone's going after the same audiance (which happens to not include me - perhaps this is the true root of my bitterness towards the media)
For pay television, radio, etc... the customer is the listener. Sounds like a much better deal to me.

Re:Who cares?

[drsquare]

"Damn good programming"? The only things worth watching on the BBC are the Simpsons and Match of the Day. And they don't even have Match of the Day anymore.

What a complete ripoff.

Re:Who cares?

[Zenjive]

Why is this flamebait?

This is the second flamebait mod abuse I've seen today!

Re:Who cares?

[Squareball]

No, what i'm saying is that every rock band right now sound EXACTLY the same! It's all RAGE AGAINST THE KORN BIZKIT!

Re:Who cares?

[FunkyRat]

sat-radio would be a great shakup to the sh*tty commercial radio corps out there

I don't see this. As far as I understand, you have the same problem here you have with regular AM and FM radio stations -- a handful of companies own more than a majority of the stations in every market (e.g. ClearChannel). Here you have one or two companies controlling which stations have access to the satellite radio subscription audience. At least with ClearChannel you have local DJs (sometimes) who might add a little local color to a station.

Have you ever noticed how much cable TV sucks? Sure, there are a handful of cool programs out there, but easily 90% of all cable programming is utter crap. I would expect the same to happen with satellite radio.

As far as it shakeing up companies like ClearChannel, I seriously doubt it. In fact, I would expect a company like ClearChannel to look at this as a way of saving tons of money. With satellite radio you would only need to pay for one station and staff to broadcast the whole country. In fact, one staff could handle several channels of satellite content.

No, when it comes down to it, I think ClearChannel and their cronies will love this, and it will only mean a more homogenized listening experience for all of us.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

How ironic you write from mac.com and have the gall to talk about great technology that solves no problems! "Headed for the landfill!" from an Apple employee. Ahhahaha! I am laughing my rear off at the hypocrisy.

I've had XMRadio for almost a month now and hardly ever turn the am/fm radio on.

sattelite radio

[dmallery]

i live in a very remote area of western new mexico. the only local radio is in navajo. you can get one or two bubble gum stations from gallup. before primestar, i had to listen to the bbc on s/w for news.

i'm ready.

Re:sattelite radio

[S. Allen]

You and maybe 10 other people in the boonies. That's not going to float the billion or so a year required to keep these loons in business.

Re:sattelite radio

[the_2nd_coming]

oh yeah and every person lives in a big city with 50 stations right?...the frige article says that there are 105 million people that live in rural america where the only radio is country and religious/talk.....sorry, I am sure that all those people could use this to.

Re:sattelite radio

[Isaac-Lew]

According to your figure of $1 billion/year, they would only need 8.33 million subscribers:

10^9 divided by 120 per subscriber = 8333333.333...

However, that figure would assume a market penetration of almost 30 percent of the US population (assuming the US population is 270 million) and at $300 to $400US per receiver I don't see that happening anytime in the near future (maybe if the price of the receiver were $100US, they would stand a better chance).

Re:sattelite radio

[Anonymous Coward]

I dont about you Americans, but in India, FM station coverage is verrry patchy and the most you can expect in most areas is the government run all-in-one FM channel. We have a satellite radio service, WorldSpace, operating in India. It offers 128kbps data rate music but the player has to be stationary [that's no problem, since the recievers are pretty bulky anyway] 20 channels of music is what we get and it is very popular here.

Re:sattelite radio

[rho]

Too bad -- you prolly got better news from BBC S/W than from whatever reconstituted pap you'll get over satellite. tho, NPR isn't bad.

Re:sattelite radio

[davidhan]

i live in a very remote area of western new mexico. the only local radio is in navajo. you can get one or two bubble gum stations from gallup. before primestar, i had to listen to the bbc on s/w for news.

Educated people that live in the middle of nowhere, sounds like a huge market!

Seriously, I can see there's a need, but will it be enough to support the industry?

Sat. Radio

[Kronik Gamer]

I believe that if these companies can get enough support from he customer market, that both will be viable standards in the future. I like the idea of being able to move around the country while not having to worry about switching between channels. This will probably be a major selling point for sat. radio, and barring any major outages, should keep the customer happy.

Re:Sat. Radio

[Anonymous Coward]

you'd pay $12/mo to avoid the inconvience of finding a new radio station once or twice a month (depending on the amount of long distance travel by car). You are a hardcore comsumer...

BTW, I've got an electric cork-screw I could sell you for $29.99 if you don't already have one.

Re:Sat. Radio

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, just think you wouldn't have to find new stations every 2-7 years after a move. Money well spent ???????

S Band

[Anonymous Coward]

Both companies transmit their signal on the S-band, at 12.5 MHz to radio receivers on the ground

Shouldn't that be 12.5 GHz?

Re:S Band

[dave3138]

Sirius Radio will use the in the 2320.0 to 2332.5 MHz frequency band. XM Radio already uses the 2332.5 to 2345.0 MHz frequency
It takes 12.5Mhz of bandwidth in the S-band segment. 2332.5-2320.0 = 12.5

I'm in...

[Byteme]

Only if I can get every college radio station from accross the country that I desire on my presets. Until then I'll stick to CDs and my MP3 player.

Commercial radio sucks big time.

Re:I'm in...

[micromoog]

The whole point of this is the large number of channels. Commercial radio "sucks big time" because there are only 3-10 or so stations in each market, so they must appeal to the lowest common denominator.

Satellite radio opens the possibility of having separate channels like "death metal", "doom metal", and "speed metal". This level of granularity beats even the best college radio stations (unless what you REALLY want is local music, in which case you should just buy the CDs to support them anyway).

Re:I'm in...

[ddstreet]

unless what you REALLY want is local music, in which case you should just buy the CDs to support them anyway

Part of the appeal of college radio stations is that they play local bands that you haven't heard of.

Re:I'm in...

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if I can get every college radio station from accross the country that I desire on my presets.

You can't. The station manager at WFMU contacted Sirius and XM, but got turned down.

Less interesting that it used to be

[crow]

Five years ago, this would have been the coolest thing in the world. Imagine being able to commute in the morning an listen to music instead of a pair of DJs chatting. Sure, you could pop in a tape or CD, but that can be a pain.

Now, it's not quite so interesting. The early adopters have been, at least in part, co-opted by car MP3 players. If I had a long commute, you can bet that's the direction I would invest my car audio dollars.

Of course, there is still a significant market for them, but it's just a little harder to get people excited about it than it would have been a few years ago.

Re:Less interesting that it used to be

[FatRatBastard]

There are only a few things that I would actually pay to hear on the radio:

News/Sport? There's almost always a news station somewhere on the AM or FM dial. No need to pay there.

Music? I rarely listen to any music station. I have enough MiniDiscs in the car to keep me happy (just like the previously mentioned MP3 players).

Sporting Events? If I'm going to subscribe to sporting events outside of my local coverage I'd rather spend my money on a Satalite TV subscription. How many games am I going to want to listen to in my car? Plus, most of the stuff I listen to I can get free over the web (Ipswich Town FC) or if needs be can pay $30 to Real/MLB for a season pass to any baseball game.

For me, that leaves unique/niche shows. If I lived somewhere where Stern wasn't syndicated I'd think about dropping some cash to listen to him. Thankfully I live in DC, so I get that for free as well.

As someone has already pointed out, its a nice idea, but I think the satalite radio companies have overestmated the demand out there for thier service. They'll have to come up with something above and beyond simply reproducing the radio experience over satelite to get lots of people to fork over $$$.

Just my $0.02

Re:Less interesting that it used to be

[Mr_Matt]

You know, I agree with this person, and I'm not trying to flame him/her, but there's a statement in there that just kind of irks me:

Sure, you could pop in a tape or CD, but that can be a pain.

Why is it that paying $10/month for radio, advertising and all, is less of a pain than "move hand to CD rack, pick up CD, put CD in slot, push play?" I find it amazing that the Western World will go to great lengths to avoid any inconvenience, especially tortuous ones like inserting CDs into slots. :) Besides, with the "granularity" everybody's talking about, what you'll end up with is a radio that plays fourteen different kinds of bluegrass on fourteen different stations - continually hitting the "next station" button to find your favorite flavor has to be at least as much work as putting in a CD, right? :)

Re:Less interesting that it used to be

[dkresge]

And, generally speaking,

1) I don't encode commercial interruptions into my MP3s for in car enjoyment (XM = $9.95 and only 30% commercial free? no thanks.)

2) I can rip a lot of music for $120/YR.

Re:Less interesting that it used to be

[rw2]

Now, it's not quite so interesting. The early adopters have been, at least in part, co-opted by car MP3 players. If I had a long commute, you can bet that's the direction I would invest my car audio dollars.

Nah. Well, maybe not nah. Just be careful not to interject too much of what *you* want into what the general public wants.

Of the 15 people in my family, I can imagine 1 getting MP3, 5-6 getting sat radio and the others sticking with FM. Of the 1 getting MP3 (Me), I'll get sat radio also.

This is a huge market, IMHO.

Re:Less interesting that it used to be

[crow]

CDs have a number of disadvantages:

Laziness dictates that you will often have the same CD or small number of CDs in your car. You don't get nearly the variety you would with a MP3 jukebox or radio station.

Creating mix tapes or CDs requires a significant effort. Unless you spend a lot of time preparing your music, you'll end up listening to only one artist for each commute, and that can get boring.

Of course, for me, my commute is only 15 minutes--not long enough to bother even fixing my broken radio.

Re:Less interesting that it used to be

[Jburkholder]

Fumbling with a CD case while trying to drive *is* a pain. I put a CD in my player while I'm in my driveway and listen to it all the way to and from work. Beats trying to listen to radio, but I'd really like something more flexible than listening to 10-12 tracks off a single CD.

You could put a CD changer in your trunk to improve it somewhat, but that has other obvious drawbacks.

>continually hitting the "next station" button to find your favorite flavor has to be at least as much work as putting in a CD, right

I don't think so. Changing a CD has more steps (take old one out, put it away or throw it on floor, select new one and insert it) and you likely have to take your eyes off the road.

In general, I agree with your sentiment that Western Civilization prizes convenience above all, but I don't think 100 radio stations at your fingertips is that outrageous a luxury.

Re:Less interesting that it used to be

[Pointy_Hair]

I think a lot of this audience loses sight of the "gadget challenged" that make up the majority of the market. I doubt my parents would ever be bothered with an mp3 player at home or in the car. The only time they ever use CD's or tapes is when there's no radio reception. Not to mention the fact that you have to go out and pay $10-20 for each CD and except for about 1 in 100, most CD's have 1 or 2 good selections and the rest are filler.

To them, satellite radio does what cable TV does: instant access to more channels to pick from. I'm even too lazy to bother with an mp3 player because my listening isn't that premeditated. I enjoy the digital audio channels I get on cable and think it would be cool in the car too.

I agree with the commercial free crowd though. If I subscribe to either service I want music not ads. I probably spend an hour a day in the car and don't care for the DJ banter and usually not in the mood for talk radio. The morning is worst - I can often cycle thru 6 presets and get no music.

Re:Less interesting that it used to be

[SquadBoy]

One market that you have overlooked is over-the-road truckers. I fill up at a local truck stop because they have *very* cheap gas. They guys who drive big trucks are loving this tech. Also I have a long commute but I can pick up several FM stations for the whole thing. If not the talk part of this would appeal to me in a big way.

Re:Less interesting that it used to be

[mosch]

yeah, and VCRs will ruin the satellite television market. You're comparing apples to volvos.

The fact of the matter is that just because you decide that you don't like it (without even being exposed to it) doesn't mean it's not viable, or that I'm not sitting here thinking 'that'd be pretty dope if my next car had Sirius built in'.

I'd love if somebody would give me music that was good enough that I didn't have to keep piles of CDs in every car, inevitably ruining some of the CDs and losing some others, and only having a rotation of 20 or 30 discs per car.

This doesn't even bring up road trips... I recently drove to Ohio from Eastern Pennsylvania because well, flying from PHL to CLE doesn't make much sense when it takes 3 hours to clear security. It would've been really nice to not have to fumble with CDs during that trip. (they get hard to change safely when you're driving 120MPH after all)

So in conclusion, shut the fuck up.

Re:Less interesting that it used to be

[MalletShaft]

The biggest benefit I see is that a lot of people don't want to take the time to find and load MP3's. Radio has the benefit of letting someone else figure out what to play for me. As the number of available songs goes up, the time taken to organize and select those songs also goes up. I don't change the CD's in my car very often because I just don't feel like going through 500 CD's or 5,000 MP3's and guessing what kind of moods I'll be in that week.

Until now, radio has had the drawback of settling on the lowest common denominator, so letting someone else pick my music hasn't been a better alternative.

With satellite radio, there is finally a way for me to have someone else pick the music and probably get it consistently good because I get a more focused genre. That is certainly worth $10 a month. I'm not paying for better music, I'm paying for the service.

Re:Less interesting that it used to be

[Anonymous Coward]

So what exactly is it that makes popping a CD or tape in to play a pain, but setting up an mp3 player to play in your car a breeze?

Re:Less interesting that it used to be

[evilned]

Well, in rural areas large mp3 collections are problematic because of the lack of broadband. I lived in rural montana for quite awhile, and you were lucky to get 28.8. Even ISDN was not an option there. Also, there are situations where radio does things that are not possible with mp3, namely any sort of live event from sporting events to talk radio. Personally, I would have killed for this sort of thing when I used to drive combine for harvest. I had my choice of NPR (which isnt bad, but can get really monotonous) or the right wing radio talk network.

Re:Less interesting that it used to be

[drsquare]

Hahahaa!!! Ipswich are bottom!!

Long live the mighty Wanderers!!!

Re:Less interesting that it used to be

[FatRatBastard]

Yeah, they stink like French cheese this year.

Gotta support the boys though... been doing it for 20 years.

Coverage

[mini me]

In many cases, huge segments of the music industry get little or no coverage by mainstream radio.

Lucky them!

Seriously, if this technology is just an overglorified radio, what is the benifit? If they provide radio stations with content the people want to hear (like non-mainstream music in all genres) then you might have a winner.

Of course if this frequency is ideal for wireless satellite broadband internet access then get the radio off it immediately! You can stream the radio over the net if you have to.

Re:Coverage

[Anonymous Coward]

...Well, 100 channels sounds like a lot of potential content. My local radio has about 20-30 stations, many of which are really similar. What if I could get three stations that played jazz, or 10 stations that played different slices of "rock"?

Re:Coverage

[geekoid]

If they provide radio stations with content the people want to hear (like non-mainstream music in all genres)
here's something people seem to be missing. MOST people like mainstream music, thats why its mainstream. This bland programing is there because people listen to it, and call in to the station.
Is this sad, yes. But then since most people never learn how to think, its not surprising.

So the question is, will sat. radio get enough oney from the niche markets to survive long enough to become a realistic option for mainstream listeners? I imagine once there put into all cars, it will be an option they throw into your payments schedule, then it may have a chance. of course all the popular sat radio stations will sound like current radio stations, but I don't really know how to end the sentence.

Re:Coverage

[the_2nd_coming]

if you have over 100 channels all playing the same crap that would be pathetic. I would hope that there is only one or 2 channels with the same type of music, that way you can have as tons of genras that were not played anywhere.

country and pop only need one channel since it is all the same crap and folks who listen to that will listen to it all. then there is the classic rock and hard rock and metal and all there children. punk, alternative, rap+all those sub genre. this leaves atround I would say 40 or so music stations that have no format.....that leaves open a large chunk of stations that can have some cultural music. then we get to the talk and news stations that exist passed the music alotment.

there is room for everyones tasts hear, and the music can be so spesific to each station that you literaly would not have to change the station because some teeny bop crap comes on.

it is radio heaven!!!

Re:Coverage

[Jus'n]

If they provide radio stations with content the people want to hear (like non-mainstream music in all genres) then you might have a winner.

Hate to be the one to tell you this, but by definition, "mainstream" music IS what people want to hear. You're suffering from the all-too-common human curse of thinking everyone in the world is like you and your own local peer group.

You want to know what the benefit is? Let me give you an example:

Do you get cable/satellite TV? Have you ever gone for any length of time without it? I didn't get cable until I was about 10 years old. I was perfectly content before that, watching local saturday morning cartoons, watching local network sitcoms like Who's the Boss, etc. Then around 10 or 11, I got cable, and discovered the joys of USA's Cartoon Express (and now, we have a whole Cartoon Network!), and found a whole world of other programming on those 40 or so channels (at the time). Not to mention all those wonderful movies on the premium channels we got for free as a sign-up bonus (back when I was 11 or so, I was more easily amused. Or maybe Showtime sucks now. At least Skinemax is still living up to its name...). I got to watch TV shows that actually stimulate, rather than sedate, the mind! Then, after a couple years, my family decided that they didn't really watch all those channels, and we could save a little chunk of change by ditching cable, so we did. We went back to watching drivel like Who's the Boss, and OMFG it sucked! It lasted about 6 months before my parents broke and got cable again. What's the moral to this story, you may ask? Local programming, like broadcast TV and radio, is necessarily limited. Niche markets, on a local scale, are not generally worth catering to. Sure, local programming is interesting for curiosity's sake when it's not your own local area, or for keeping grounded in your local world, which is all fine and good, but it certainly does NOT bring you the best the media has to offer. Generally, they cater to the lowest common denominator, and odds are, in your area, that's pretty damn low (at least compared to the average Slashdot-Intellectual).

Is cable perfect? Of course not. It's necessarily limited in bandwidth, and therefore you DO get some of that lowest-common-denominator effect (HOW many f***ing times a day is that Emeril loser on Food TV? ok, bad example, since he owns a bunch of it, but still. And how many Turner networks do I really need? Especially since Discovery took all their good shows on put them on specialty networks, like Discovery Wings, Discovery Science, and Discovery Health, leaving bassically NOTHING good on Plain Ol' Discovery Channel, the only one I get). Sorry for the rant. At any rate, sure, cable's not perfect (leaving the door open for DBS and digital cable), but ye gods! have you seen broadcast TV lately? One or two good shows a week, and everything else melts your brain!

Now imagine how that could apply to radio. I live in the DC metro area. We have a lot of radio. I think we have something like 20 FM stations. I don't like a single damn one of them. I think the two modern rock stations sync their (bad) playlists just to piss me off. The 3 "Mix" stations play an interesting "mix" of decent music and crap... heavy on the crap. Country stations are right out, as are the hip-hop/R&B/whatever you want to call 'em stations. Occasionally I get a jonesin' for some classical, some nice Beethoven or Wagner, but our classical stations just play lilting little fairy-dust stuff whenever I turn them on. Jazz is totally hit-or-miss when I hit the public/college stations (maybe one good song a month, due mostly to the fact that they only play jazz maybe 2 hrs a day, and only when I'm not listening to the radio). One thing I can count on is the morning shows. WHFS's morning show will, at least once every single weekday morning, talk about Fred Durst. And that's only in the 45 minutes or so I listen, out of, what, 4 hours they're on? The Mix stations have ok morning shows, and that's really the only thing I listen to the radio for anymore. Much like broadcast TV... local news is really all it seems to be good for anymore. All the good shows on local broadcast channels are made by the NETWORKS which probably only broadcast ANYTHING because not everyone has cable/DBS yet.

Why listen to someone else's playlists at all? Well, I have about 45 hours' worth of MP3s here at work, and maybe another 100 hours on CD at home that I haven't ripped yet, and I get SICK of my music. I'll go a month or so just loving the crap out of my mixes (MD player for the morning commute) and then go a month without listening to a single thing I already own. That month is painful, because I'm reduced to listening to that locally broadcast shite.

I welcome satellite radio (and I get especially creamy at the thought of what will replace it!).

-j

Re:Coverage

[zeda]

Cart before the horse.

They listen because there is nothing else. They buy because of scientifically targeted marketing and promotion. And remember, video killed the radio star.

Even specific genres get old. How many classical stations just play Beethoven and Mozart.

Re:Coverage

[whoisjoe]

I got excited about this until I read somewhere that access to this system is completely governed by XM (i.e., if you want to set up a channel, you have to go through them).

If the channels go to the highest bidder, I don't hold a lot of hope for the quality of programming.

Re:Coverage

[pyite69]

> Seriously, if this technology is just an overglorified radio,
> what is the benifit?

It is different in one key way. With FM radio, you are not a
customer; you are a product that is delivered to advertisers
and record lables, who are the real customers.

Because satellite is commercial-free, and there are more
channels, there is a bigger incentive to provide diverse and
interesting programming.

Obviously I'm being optimistic, but I think it has potential.

Re:Coverage

[LS]

If they provide radio stations with content the people want to hear, it WILL be all mainstream music. "The people" are the mainstream. Have you flipped through the 100 channels on your TV lately? Almost all crap. Anyone who really has divergent tastes really needs to get an MP3 player, or wireless broadband connection when those are eventually available.

LS

Cartman

[Anonymous Coward]

Cartman was a pioneer in satellite radio. Out his ass.

XM radio

[wiredog]

There's been lots of coverage of their system in the Washington Post. Look for stories by (former) radio reporter Frank Ahrens. He likes XM

If you liked WHFS back in the day, one of their former dj's now works for XM.

XM handles signal fade in cities by putting repeaters up all over the place.

Re:XM radio

[S. Allen]

They're getting all this coverage from "journalists" who's desks and cars are sporting fancy new *free* XM sattellite radios. It's not like it just became an interesting topic.

Re:XM radio

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like CmdrTaco's demo MP3 devices...

Re:XM radio

[jtseng]

I liked Slashdot back in the day... :^)

PS - IMO WHFS currently sucks. I really miss when they were REALLY alternative.

Re:XM radio

[Brian Feldman]

HFS isn't "alternative" and never was; it's always been "modern rock". It's the best choice available around here, and their concerts are the best. I dislike that they insert less new music into the rotation now than they used to -- I can't stand hearing the same Nirvana songs I've been hearing for the last decade.

Re:XM radio

[robp]

Since wiredog was so kind as to mention my employer: here's the review I did a few weeks ago. Comments welcome...

License?

[anthony_dipierro]

Do the satellite companies need to obtain a negotiated license to "broadcast" these songs over this medium? I was under the impression that once you charged a subscription fee, ASCAP licenses were no longer valid.

60 channels of music...

[wangi]

Of the same music! Damn, America has two types of music - Country and Western!

Re:60 channels of music...

[Pope Slackman]

Of the same music! Damn, America has two types of music - Country and Western!

Not true! You forgot "shitty teen pop" and "shitty rap-metal".

C-X C-S

Re:60 channels of music...

[OmegaDan]

You screwed up the bit --

its, "What kind of music do you listen to here?"
"Oh we have both kinds, country and western"

get your blues brothers right if your gonna tell their jokes :)

Outside of radio markets

[ManualCrank Angst]

You in the big cities and even you in the more heavily populated rural areas may not realize what this means. But ask anyone who has driven across Montana, Wyoming, and one or both of the Dakotas: There are literally miles and miles where you cannot get any radio at all. I'm not saying "nothing but talk" or "nothing but Hat Act music". I'm saying literally NOTHING.

For this reason, I'm guessing that satellite radio receivers would be a big hit in Ryder/UHaul trucks. It would also keep them from having to reprogram the radio settings at every location.

Re:Outside of radio markets

[Anonymous Coward]

You should read the comment before you post. Did you notice the part about sirius's music channels being commercial free?

Gwad, I cant belive the crap that moderators upvote...

Re:Outside of radio markets

[Anonymous Coward]

I enjoy hitting the scan button while driving across New Mexico. I time how long it takes for the radio to actually lock onto something. :-)

Re:Outside of radio markets

[dsfox]

Here in San Diego it feels like we're outside of radio markets - at least all the ones that don't suck. I would pay for these services *if* they carried something I was interested in - a Pacifica station, KPFK, WFMU in Hoboken, anything good! But no such luck I guess.

Re:Outside of radio markets

[ksheff]

I've done that a few years ago. On the eastern side of that area, WNAX can be picked easily in the day time. I believe they claim a 250,000 sq mile coverage and can be picked up in Texas at night. If you can't pick up that station, your radio's broken.

Once you get west of the Missouri, it does get a little spotty, but I haven't had any problem picking up stations. Some may be the tribal station on a reservation though. Maybe things have changed and some stations have gone out of business. Even if I was back home, I still wouldn't pay for radio w/ commercials.

Re:Outside of radio markets

[Anonymous Coward]

Sirius is being beta-tested in San Diego even as we speak..

Question about reception

[astrashe]

I live in a high rise. My windows are on the North, and in every other direction, including straight up, there's a lot of steel.

Would I be able to receive XM signals? I can't get satellite TV, obviously.

I love radio, and would buy XM in an instant if I knew it would work. But I haven't seen very much information on reception. Most of their marketing and FAQs seem to be aimed at people in cars and trucks. I like to drive as much as the next guy (more, probably), but I'm just not on the road that often.

Re:Question about reception

[MindStalker]

Hello! They said they are going to put many repeaters in urban areas. Meaning if you live in a large city, and you get good reception on your cell phone. Expect to be able to receive this.

Re:Question about reception

[astrashe]

Thanks... I guess that means that I'll have to wait awhile for the repeaters to go up, though.

Re:Question about reception

[Cy Guy]

I live in a high rise. My windows are on the North, and in every other direction, including straight up, there's a lot of steel. Would I be able to receive XM signals? I can't get satellite TV, obviously.

The plan to have repeaters in big cities should help this. Unlike Satellite TV you would likely have a repeater within a couple of miles in direct line of site unless in you already on the far northern edge of the city.

If you want a more definitive answer you could try posting what neighborhood you live in and maybe someone can track down the exact location of nearby repeaters. Regardless, you could just purchase a receiver with a credit card and return if you don't get any signal.

If I was XM or Sirius I would have at least one station that you could get all the time without a subscription fee that would serve both as way to get lapsed subscribers to sign-up, and as sort of a channel guide. Plus it would let people test out their hardware without having to go through the new user registration stuff.

Speaking of user registration, anyone know how the two systems compare regarding listener privacy? I know Sirius has no ads, but that doesn't mean they are tracking the demographics of purchasers of the service. For XM, you have to exepct that part of the $3 discount is adverstisers knowing just what demographic groups are listening to what stations.

Re:Question about reception

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends. Do you wear braces?

Re:Question about reception

[jmatlock]

The radios are one way... unlike DirecTV/etc., your car radio doesn't dialup Sirius/XM to tell them what you're listening to.

In other words, they have no idea what you're listening to, so they can't collect demographics on you.

Re:Question about reception

[Schaffner]

It looks like XM has a preview channel (ch. 1) that is available before you activate, in fact they recommend you don't activate until you can hear that channel.

Re:Question about reception

[Anonymous Coward]

they can't collect demographics on you.

When you sign up thy collect at a minimum billing information. Presumably they also collect some sort of "survey" data, how seperate do they keep the "survey" data from the billing data that can individually identify you?

your vcr is messed up

[Anonymous Coward]

I found your homemade diaper movie

San Diego Blues

[McD!ck]

San Diego is so devoid of radio competition that we have 1 independent radio station worth listening to. The rest of our stations are Clear Channel or clarity or something corperate radio. Sure we have some PBS action and all that stuff, but no real choices when it comes to blues, rock, techno/electronica/trance/goa, alternative, etc. I am going to get XM radio installed if only for the divirsity of music that we SHOULD have already! Why can't I just like what everyone else likes?

Maybe that is why I am here. . . ;)
Does anybody have any realworld experiance with XM?

Re:San Diego Blues

[gid]

That's my main question that hasn't been answered yet. I like some top 40 stuff, but my real passion in music now has been mostly eletronic based music. Eletronica/trance/goa/house/some dance/jungle/etc. I currently can't get any of that music on the FM band. I have to turn to shoutcast for that. ( www.digitallyimported.com rules btw ) but I can't listen to DI wherever I want, I need bandwidth at that location, which definitely isn't always available.

If XM or SR or whatever it is has this type of music, with a decent DJ's, and someone just didn't push the random eletronic music button, then I'll be all over it.

Oh and the player is going to have to be small (discman sized), so I can carry it around, use it with headphones, hook it up to a friends stereo, hook it up to my car ( why do car stereo makers refuse to put in an external input as standard btw? ), whatever, for $300 a player, I'm not definitely not gonna buy two. (question, if I do buy two, do have to pay two subscriptions? if so, there's no way anyone's gonna fall for it then)

Re:San Diego Blues

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in the LA area and spend about two hours each day in the car. I got this thing about a month ago, and so far it's been great. IMHO, the choice is very good. I listen mainly to rock/alternative/heavy metal and have about 6-7 stations that play that stuff non-stop. That includes an "unsiged" channel that plays some interesting music from unsigned groups. In addition there are MTV, VH1, and others that will play some good stuff. As for other genres, I cannot say anything, as I did not really listen to them, but looking at the lineup and it looks pretty good. So far, I did not run into any occasion that there was NOTHING interesting on (which was the case with FM about 90% of the time). Unfortunately, some channels have commercials, but last only about a minute, so it isn't too bad. Another thing: quite a few stations play uncensored music, so there are no annoying beeps. As far as coverage goes, I did not run into an area without a signal (besides underground parking structures).

Re:San Diego Blues

[Anonymous Coward]

Sirius is currently being tested (limited beta) in San Diego. You'll have a choice if you wait for it..

digital radio?

[Graff]

I would love this if they were broadcasting in digital radio. It would be cool to be able to have song titles listed, have the quality of digital, be able to search for a particular type of music or song being played, etc. If it is just analog then I'm not so sure if it will take off.

Re:digital radio?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would love this if they were broadcasting in analog radio. Then it would be free!

Re:digital radio?

[RocketScientist]

I've got channel number, channel name, artist, and song title for almost all of the stations on my XM radio receiver. The only problem is that the screen's a bit too small. It is digitally broadcast.

-rs

Opening the door to car-based subscriptions?

[quistas]

"I get the feeling they want this to work, if only because it lets them get a foot in the car door with subscription-based services."

So car manufacturers want to adopt practices of other industries? I find it hard to believe that there's a great consumer need out there for car-delievered subscription services, since the vast majority of car owners spend such a limited (if regular) time in their cars that it doesn't offer the value DirecTV/cable/DSL/etc offer.

Further, the car's considered a big, expensive appliance, like a washing machine -- customers aren't going to spend extra monthly over the life of the car for something like leather seats. I think the potential market the car makers are trying to tap into is extremely limited, but look towards their attempts with fear.

-- q

Re:Opening the door to car-based subscriptions?

[sg3000]

> I find it hard to believe that there's a great
> consumer need out there for car-delievered
> subscription services

Sure, there is a need, but I don't think it's necessarily digital radio. Mercedes-Benz has their integrated phone/roadside assistance function with GPS (kind of like On-star) that comes standard on every MB today. You pay a yearly subscription for the service-- an incredible $200/year, and that doesn't include airtime!

When you buy the car, you get a free 1-year subscription, plus some airtime. I've heard that the re-sign rate after the first year is fairly high, so some people see some value in it.

However, that could an isolated case. I'm having a hard time believing that people would pay for that, plus some satellite radio service that required a subscription as well. From the perspective of users not wanting to subscribe to multiple services, I can see a downside there -- same reason why many people don't subscribe to multiple magazines. And with MP3 players becoming more popular, many people would view satellite radio as a competitor to MP3 players.

I think there will be some limited markets for this: stations for rural areas, piped muzak for businesses and retail stores, and similar. I don't see it getting big for mainstream consumers when other more accepted substitute items exist: regular radio, cassette tapes, CDs, and MP3 players. Plus, good-ol', traditional conversation!

I will NOT pay for XM.

[reaper20]

I will not pay $10 a month for the 'right' to listen to more commercials. I pay $40 a month for internet, and get spammed from them. I pay $80 a month for Directv, and get more "special offer" channels instead of more movies in DD5.1 GM's OnStar deal, more cost the car, and when your 'free trial' runs out, there's another monthly fee, otherwise, you paid for some electronic gizmo in your new GM car that won't work in 5 years, and another route for more spam, crammed down our throats, on systems that WE are paying for.

And don't give me that garbage about "your monthly fee only covers infrastructure costs, someone needs to pay for content." I don't buy that for a second, if I pay for a service, don't cram ads down to consumers. That's why I am using a pay service to begin with.

This doesn't offer me anything that I don't get with free FM (which is financed by commercials, fair tradeoff). CD quality? Big deal, I can throw an mp3 player in my car for cheap these days.

They will fail and blame "poor market conditions" or have some other excuse for not making money. Funny how noone says "We didn't use common sense" as an excuse.

Re:I will NOT pay for XM.

[Anonymous Coward]

But you get a different product than with FM. Sure FM is free, but what if you want to listen to hip-hop (real hip-hop, with it's broadcast unfriendly "adult" language) or real Latin music (and you live in Maine)? I can't hear the Cure on the radio where I live ("Friday I'm in Love" doesn't count). Maybe I'll pay for it.

Re:I will NOT pay for XM.

[austad]

I agree completely. XM has the advantage of being out first, especially right before christmas. But there is no friggin' way in hell I'm going to *PAY* $10 a month for more commercials. I will happily pay $12.95 a month though to Sirius for commercial free music.

An mp3 player in the car would be nice, but it requires love and attention for adding new music, creating playlists, etc. It's nice to just be able to turn on the radio and hear music. Plus, you get exposed to new music on the radio, with an mp3 player, you are limited to what's in your current library.

I've complained many times to XM about their commercials, and several of my friends have also. It appears that they have made a few channels commercial free now because of all of the complaints, but there are still commercials, and there is no way I'm going to pay for that.

Re:I will NOT pay for XM.

[Anonymous Coward]

Good for you. Oddly you will pay for internet access and DirecTV which you say also suck. I think a large number of people will subscribe to a satellite based radio service who have to drive long distances. As for in home use, I don't know. My digital cable system offers several commercial free music channels, all specific to a particular style of music, I rarely use them. I guess it all depends on how you get your music and what you like.

I would like a satellite music service that I can customize. Effectively configure it to play a mix of classic rock, modern rock, and random 80s music and allow me the ability to tell it when it has picked a song that I hate so it doesn't play it again. If the service worked really well it would be worth paying for.

Re:I will NOT pay for XM.

[waitdyahoo.com]

I agree,

I am not going to pay for a service that has comercials.. If they didn't have comercials and I was able to bring my rights to listen to the music from my car, to house or what ever that would be some thing I would think about.

But the way I read it the radio receiver and chip is tied to your car at this time.

Make it a smart card and make "portable" receivers that all use the same standards and then they may have a service.

Also as part of the contract I would insist that they cannot add comercails with out the option of me cancling my service at that time.

Re:I will NOT pay for XM.

[Anonymous Coward]

speaking of digital cable music. would it not be realy nice to be able to have a radio that plugs into a cable outlet so you can hear the music with out having the TV on?

Re:I will NOT pay for XM.

[the_2nd_coming]

that is actualy a good Idea, you should be able to carry your subscription with you. I would not pay for a service for my car then one for the house. of cource I watch TV in the house while I surf the net and read newsgroups.....if I do listen to the radio, it is tom lykis(sp) and Dominski & Doyle (I live in Detroit)

that is about all I listen to at home.

Re:I will NOT pay for XM.

[KaiserSoze]

But there is no friggin' way in hell I'm going to *PAY* $10 a month for more commercials. I will happily pay $12.95 a month though to Sirius for commercial free music.

It may sound good now, but just wait a few seconds. If Sirius ever has the slightest bit of financial trouble, out comes the spam. This is my opinion, but an educated one I believe. Companies are so greedy these days that even if Sirius were to make a ton of money on sat radio, at some point they would need to increase the bottom line even more for their shareholders, and you just know that that little twinkle in their eye will turn sat radio into the EXACT same radio we have now: 12 minutes of music per hour, 1 solid hour of music per day, and two inane, failed comedians prank calling the local guy who won the cheese log carving contest (i.e., a 'morning show').

On a not-quite-tangent story, I told most everyone I knew on Sep. 12th that the airline industry was going to use the tragedy to rip every one of us in America a new economic anus, and damned if I wasn't right. "Our sales are down! boo-hoo." "We need aid from the governement! boo-hoo." "We have to have layoffs! boo-hoo." [is it Christmas time yet?] "Every ticket is $1500. It doesn't matter where you're going!"

The airline industry managed to convince everyone that life sucked, and they cut enough flights so that when it came time for the holidays, they could rightfully charge whatever they wanted for tickets. Hey it doesn't matter if people are scared to fly this year, if they want to be with their family, they're gonna pump our bottom line, so we can charge anything. Demand exceeds supply, therefore I go broke if I don't want to be alone in Cali this Christmas. Airlines make me sick.

Re:I will NOT pay for XM.

[Anonymous Coward]

Me? I'm just going to wait for someone to hack the reciever to recieve everything. then I'll buy one.

oh and this would be 100% legal in canada :-) why cant we have more common sense laws here in the states? I'll start speaking french if it helps!

Re:I will NOT pay for XM.

[Jburkholder]

>make "portable" receivers that all use the same standards

This is an excellent point and something I was thinking about. Paying for service with commercials aside, I would be interested in something like this if I could have it at home and in the office as well (I spend ~15 minutes in my car each way to work). If I could have 2+ receivers that were tied to a single subscription via some kind of SIM card, I might go for this.

I bet this won't happen for some time though. Something tells me they decided to focus on automotive applications and they probably have exclusivity deals with the automakers.

Re:I will NOT pay for XM.

[karb]

Heh. That's what people said about cable TV, too.

Anyway, commercials are good. If there are no commercials, that means that all the stations need to be sponsored by XM. That seems nice, but really leads to homogeneity, and, of course, gives XM control over both content and delivery. What happens when we go through another 1990's and the company realizes that bluegrass accounts for .5% of cost but only .1% of subscribers would quit if it were taken away? Companies kill profitable ventures because they Aren't Profitable Enough.

I'd rather have it transmit at least a few independent stations with commercials and be more assured of programming I enjoy.

Re:I will NOT pay for XM.

[dtremit]

sony has one; it's mentioned in the post:

"One very exciting product is Sony's 'Plug and Play'
DRN-XM01 model that works in both your car and home stereo system through the use of a $150 adapter kit."

Re:I will NOT pay for XM.

[Suppafly]

Exactly, I might be old fashioned being 20 and all, but I was brought up with the understanding that commercials paid for it all. I pay for internet access so I don't have to look at commercials like you would have to do with bluelight or netzero. I wouldn't be willing to pay half price to get half as many commercials. Damnit if it has commercials it should be free, its been paid for.

I'll start using satellite radio when its free. I don't value the ability to listen to random music enough to pay for it.

Re:I will NOT pay for XM.

[WinDoze]

If you run your audio through a separate home theater receiver (and you subscribe to digital cable with 50-ish music channels) you can do this right now... Just flip on the cable box and the receiver and tune in a music channel on the cable box, no TV necessary.

Re:I will NOT pay for XM.

[Jburkholder]

Yeah, I saw that (although the link is /.ed) but that sounds like you pull it out of your car each time you want to take it inside. Although that would probably work ok, I'd probably rather have a receiver permanently installed with home stereo (especially if wife wants to listen in the car while I'm at home)

Re:I will NOT pay for XM.

[RocketScientist]

Umm...huh.

Some of the stations do have commercials. The comedy stations, probably due to more expensive content. The CNN/WeatherChannel/ESPN Radio talk channels, probably due to the fact that they're just getting feeds from other commercial services. However, I'd rather listen to ESPN Radio, commercials and all, than listen to something that doesn't have the coverage and commentary that ESPN does. I doubt that either XM or Sirius would be able to put together a high-quality sports show, for example. The XM Radio news stuff is mostly just read off-the-wire, so it's not so great either. I just wish they had more NPR-ish news.

The music channels are generally commercial free. Some have commercials (on the order of a minute or two an hour maybe). Many do not (the decade stations are, I believe, commercial free). Some content with advertising, some without. I remember hearing that their alternative-ish station was doing an hourlong commercial-free concert last night.

There's a mix of both. If you have the service, and you don't want the commercials, you can either avoid the stations with commercials or (gasp) change stations. There's a hundred of them, chances are you'll find at least 5 or 10 that are acceptable to your tastes.

Re:I will NOT pay for XM.

[sneakcjj]

You are simply someone who wants something for nothing. As a consumer, you are nothing. You pay very little for the goods/services you want yet you complain when the providers try to make up the money you don't provide.

The reason many popular products are cheap is because of "subscription" based pricing. If you don't want ads, pay more money. Tell your broadband provider you want to pay business prices and they won't cram ads to you. Better yet, get your own T-line, register your own domain name (there are places that don't spam you) and set up your own email servers.

Pay your celluar provider more money to stop spamming you and selling your information. If you sign up for a business plan they won't sell your information (at least mine doesn't). Oh, and give them $300 for the cost of the phone too that way you don't owe them for that.

Cancel your magazine subscriptions and research any topic you are interested in yourself. Better yet, pay the publisher more money for content without ads.

Bottom line is, if you don't want spam and ads, pay more money for what you want. Maybe you don't want to hear that because it is true and you have no rebuttal for it. It takes effort to get exactly what you want, but since you are not willing to do that stick with your basic services and deal with the spam. Stop whining and do something about it.

Re:I will NOT pay for XM.

[ZxCv]

According to the article, supposedly around 30 of XM's 60 music channels are commercial-free. And I'm highly skeptical that Sirius will always be able to stick to commercial-free by only being $3 more per month.

I think eventually this service will be big enough that it will be like regular AM/FM radio--the content is completely supported by advertising, you just have to purchase a device to listen to it.

Re:I will NOT pay for XM.

[Animixer]

CD quality? Big deal, I can throw an mp3 player in my car for cheap these days.

Am I the only person who still uses CDs for "CD Quality" music? :-)

Realistically though, 74 minutes of music is probably more than enough for most trips. If not, take two CDs! I just make a couple mix cds and keep them in the back seat.

mpb

Re:I will NOT pay for XM.

[austad]

Actually, in a previous article I read about XM, they will have exactly 29 commercial free channels. But, is it just a coincedence that they also have exactly 29 news/talk only channels?

I should just sign up and then cancel citing too many commercials, just to make a point. It probably wouldn't matter much, but it would if many people did it.

Let's finish the job

[Zen Mastuh]

Can we finally rid the world of the middleman now? We have:

• A limitless supply of artists
• A limitless supply of music fans
• Ubiquitous medium (satellite radio)
• Music sharing services (Morpheus, etc...) and payment services (PayPal, etc...) that can be improved to be secure and can be coordinated to allow music fans to pay a fair price (read: far less than $17 per CD) directly to the artists.
• A corrupt, outdated system in which the artist gets screwed at the time the contract is signed, the fan gets screwed at the checkout counter, and the industry's trade association lobbies for (and receives) absurd laws with draconian penalties that ensure a limitless profit stream for its minions

Someone please stop the RIAA before they ask their cronies (the gummint) to pass laws making it illegal to hum tunes to ourselves?

weather permitting...

[jodonn]

So what happens when the sky's overcast? Will the signal get lost like satellite TV? With terrestrial radio the signal only breaks when I drive under a mountain.

Re:weather permitting...

[Ledge]

Your sat line must be a lot crappier than mine. The only times I lose my signal (DSS & DirecPC) is when there is a LOT of water molicules in the air. Namely, only during really bad thunderstorms and blizzard snow conditions.

Re:weather permitting...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are losing your DTV signal with overcast skys, your dish is not pointed right... I have had one for 6+ years now and I only lose signal for a few minutes (as in 2-3) only during the worst of thunder storms maybe 3 or 4 times a year. Thats far far far less than the service interruptions with the local cable company.

Re:weather permitting...

[geekoid]

I have satalite tv, and I live in Portland. OR. where its cloudy most of the year, and I don't have a problem.
If wheather was really a problem do you think there would even be satalite tv?

Re:weather permitting...

[Drakino]

So what happens when the sky's overcast? Will the signal get lost like satellite TV?

I have lost satelite TV signals 3 times in the past 4 years that I have had it. Twice it was due to a huge amount of snow on the dish, and the third time was actually due to weather. Weather inteference shouldn't be a huge factor, and ground based repeators are being installed to also ensure manmade obstructions don't cause a problem.

Re:weather permitting...

[RocketScientist]

Mine's worked fine in rain. Haven't had heavy rain or snow yet though. I'm more worried about the antenna icing over than what happens in the clouds, I think there's probably more attenuation possibilities with antenna obstruction than with attenuation from clouds.

Keep in mind you're dealing with a more powerful signal than a satellite tv signal because they use less bandwidth (they can put out the same amount of power into a smaller amount of spectrum). They're also using newer sats, which (I would assume, probably incorrectly) have better power generation.

-rs

Re:weather permitting...

[Anonymous Coward]

I have not noticed any rain fade at all with my Sirius system. You will get outages from obstructions overhead (bridges and such) but there is a 4 second buffer to compensate for this, along with ground repeaters.

Re:weather permitting...

[davidesh]

it's C Band, which will punch through those clouds easily... it has to be a real bad thunderstorm to knock out the signal, and then it will only be faded for a short period.
of course every spring and fall your going to lose service each day for one week in a 5-10 minute window because of sun fade.

It's not the music that will sell this.

[markx16]

I see the greatest appeal in satellite radio in talk radio/news/sports, live content that you wouldn't be able to get(or at least reliably or from a consistent source) if you're on the road.
Plus, like with satellite TV, it could help you get shows from other parts of the country you'd otherwise be unable to get.

Plus, not everyone has the time or inclination to upload their music collections to mp3.

Re:It's not the music that will sell this.

[frlord]

Actually, it IS the music that will sell this, and the only reason I would consider buying satellite radio.

I used to be goth, an indie rocker, and now consider myself part of the rave/groover/dj culture, and let me tell you there is NONE of this music on the radio (unless you happen to live close enough to a decent college radio station that hasn't been shut down, forced to air amatuer coverage of division 3 womens volleyball, and actually has the signal to reach you in the entire metro area you live/commute in).

There are recycled pop and "alternative" bands playing songs that all sound the same. You also have annoying "shock jock" talk radio, which is usually 1 to 3 assholes trying to get girls to take their shirts off in the studio. Who this entertains, I don't know. There is an absolutely HUGE amount of music that is getting zero exposure on the radio. Where are the Sisters of Mercy, Girls vs. Boys, Aphex Twin?

Someone mentioned WHFS in a previous post, and that brings back fond memories. Even though I am still in DC, and I can listen to the utter crap played on WHFS now, it was the pillar of cool new stuff pre '94. I want that kind of radio back. I want to be able to listen for hours and not hear the same soundalike artists. I want to flip on the radio at 4AM and hear something I have never heard before that gets me dancing in my bedroom. If satellite radio brings that, I'll be the first to sign up.

truckers

[geekoid]

They compare themselfd to pay tv.
I think most people enjoy watching tv more then litening to the radio. How many people want to get together and listen to the big game? ~0.
Most people are in there cars for less then 2 hours a day, almost all of them neve leave there radio area. Contray to what he says, Most dense population have a wide variety of radio programming.
The only potential market I see is truckers.

I do have an idea that would make this successful, I just don't know if it would be acceptable under current regulations.

Cruising for local radio

[Tetsujin28]

For me, one of the joys of long car trips -- like DC to Boston, or DC to Denver -- is scanning for interesting local radio. Especially weird local talk radio. Same sattelite radio stations, coast to coast? Boring! No sattelite radio for me!

Re:Cruising for local radio

[Mondrames]

Ah, but then you forget the stretch from Denver to LA - one spot in Utah or nevada (if forget) there is one (1) radio station. AM. Country Gospel.

My brother's Doors CD that I had grown sick of in PA suddenly grew in popularity.

Re:Cruising for local radio

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe this will make broadcast radio more local and quirky. If satellite radio really takes off, broadcasters will have to do something to attract listeners. Playing more HOT!! singles and yammering may not be enough if people have more choices.

The $30 question is

[baptiste]

I refuse to pay for extra receivers. THink about it. 2 receivers for your two cars (if you're married or very rich :) ) plus at least one receiver on teh Home AV system. Will it still be $10/month? If so I'd sign up - seems worth it. Or will I get charged another $3-$5 for each additional receiver? I've been a DISH subscriber for years and it just irks me to have to pay $5/month for each extra receiver for additional rooms/TVs. It makes me feel like I'm getting less value.

Nope - from XM's customer agreement:

b) Multiple XM Radios. If you add additional XM Radios to your account, you may purchase a separate subscription for each one (see Section 5).

That's $30 a month - no way in the world am I paying that - sorry.

Re:The $30 question is

[rjs0977]

b) Multiple XM Radios. If you add additional XM Radios to your account, you may purchase a separate subscription for each one (see Section 5).

may is permissive not mandatory. it doesn't say anything about HAVING to purchase a subscription. i wish more stuff was like this.

Re:The $30 question is

[ShavenYak]

I'm sure by "you may purchase a separate subscription" they mean "you can also choose not to do so, but then your additional receivers will only have 100 channels of static for you to choose from".

Re:The $30 question is

[Anonymous Coward]

But you haven't violated the terms of service if you somehow ;-) ended up with the same serial number in multiple receivers, have you?

Re:The $30 question is

[Kajota]

If you use the Sony Plug and play radio you can move the radio from a docking station in your car to one in your house. So there are ways around having to pay for multiple subscriptions.

http://www.crutchfield.com/cgi-bin/S-4Y5nL2FzLr0 /P rodView.asp?s=0&c=4&g=10470&I=158XM01H&o=&a=

Re:The $30 question is

[PhuCknuT]

Unless a moron wrote their terms of service, then yes, you probably have violated it.

How long before ads?

[conan_albrecht]

Cable TV had this approach at first: premium TV with no ads. While some stations had ads, most were commercial free. Seems like deja vu here.

How long before satellite radio is no different from cable TV? Sure, it's available everywhere, but the presence of ads every 1/2 hour keep me on NPR.

Re:How long before ads?

[pyite69]

Moderators are dumbasses. Yours is the most important
comment in all of the posts here, why is it still 1.

Being commercial-free is the most important factor. I don't
think it will be as bad as cable though; with cable, each
channel can have its own policy. With Sirius, I don't think
that is the case... if they started introducing commercials,
people would leave; whereas with cable, the original cable
channels like HBO are still commercial free.

FCC rules & regulations

[Isaac-Lew]

Do the same FCC decency rules & regulations apply for satellite transmissions as they do for AM/FM? It would be sweet to listen to uncensored talk radio (imagine what Opie & Anthony could do on the air....). I think that would be the killer app for satellite radio.

Re:FCC rules & regulations

[anthony_dipierro]

Back a couple years ago Howard Stern was talking about switching to satellite radio, to get around the FCC decency rules. I'm not sure if the rules have changed, but I would guess that since it's a subscription-only service that the FCC decency rules would not apply.

As for your Opie & Anthony comment. Ugh.

Re:FCC rules & regulations

[S. Allen]

hell, I pay for cable and I still can't get Howard Stern uncensored on E!. damn damn damn.

Re:FCC rules & regulations

[Anonymous Coward]

That's an E! policy, not the FCC.

Re:FCC rules & regulations

[siegesama]

Excellent point!

Are we going to have to pay someone to broadcast bleeped out music? I mean, if there's a heavy/death/black metal channel, there's going to be a whole lot of "bad words" floating around. I already cringe when I hear "bitch" or "asshole" phased out of a song. Why would I pay for that annoyance?

I'd be perfectly happy to pay for uncensored, ad-free heavy metal/alternative/whatever stations.

Re:FCC rules & regulations

[psicE]

We shouldn't have to pay to hear uncensored talk shows or music. Freedom of speech is supposed to be a right, not a privilege; the FCC can't take that away from us. We need to correct the problem at its source, the FCC, rather than make a workaround (satellite radio) that has its own problems and will eventually have the same problems as the original medium. Notice how the FCC decency rules apply to standard cable, but not HBO... I bet that within 5 years they'll apply to HBO too.

Re:FCC rules & regulations

[stripes]

Notice how the FCC decency rules apply to standard cable, but not HBO... I bet that within 5 years they'll apply to HBO too.

I think "standard" cable chooses to be conservative in what they air. It pisses me off, I have written to CourTV to tell them I don't watch NYPD Blue reruns that they air because they choose to bleep out dialog (and "airbrush" some body parts) the network TV has already aired!

At any rate the networks are getting more bold, not less. I also don't see HBO caving many of their most popular shows (Sopranos, Sex in the City) have nudity in pretty much each episode.

As for correcting the problem at the source, I would be happy to drop the whole lame censoring scheme we use, but many people still support it. In fact I recall writing my congress critter that I was in full support of the "V chip" crap if and only if it allowed any channel to broadcast as much sex and violence as they though was proper so long as it was labeled. I mean, if a parent doesn't want a child seeing that sort of thing, the V chip would stop it, right? If not, what good is it?

I would assume nothing stops XM from broadcasting whichever version of the music they like, the question is which version do they think makes more money? (personally I like some of the "cut" version better, not because the words offend me, but some of the digital scratch out effects that Rage used were pretty cool sounding, better then "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!", but for the most part the uncut versions are better)

P.S. My Mac's spell check (OSX -- it's unix for the one button crowd!) doesn't have "fuck", one of the suggestions was "fsck"...

Re:FCC rules & regulations

[ecampbel]

And their policy is based on the guidelines set by the advertisers and cable companies.

XM

[steveo777]

Most car stereos have the ability to expand into XM Satellite recievers, as per the article, (including mine). The reciever costs more than the Stereo did, but I know that there are some great satellite radio stations out there (come on, you know you want to listen to Reggae).
Does anybody have experiance with these? How well do they work? How much does it cost per month (if it does). The main thing I see is that the stations should never fade out.

I predict:

[Anonymous Coward]

that Hillary Rosen is logged in right now and she has mod points. You will be -1 Flamebait in no time.

These are easy to hack

[WaIter Bell]

One of my buddies bought two XM radios last week and has been very happy with them. In fact, he cracked them open and found that he could "clone" his subscription onto the second radio by copying a serial EEPROM chip. So now he is offering it as a service: he will clone an XM radio onto another one for $50 and he is making a tidy little profit off of friends and neighbors by cloning his own subscription, so that they get the service for free.

In retrospect, XM should have really considered a smartcard system like that of DirecTV. Those are crackable but they are a lot more difficult. Putting the authenticator on a damn EEPROM chip was just a stupid move, and it is certain to result in large-scale piracy.

~wally

Re:These are easy to hack

[ShavenYak]

In retrospect, XM should have really considered a smartcard system like that of DirecTV.

Yep, and that also could have solved the problem of the poster above (the "$30 a month" topic). With a smartcard, you could have one subscription per person, perhaps an additional fee for additional cards. Then, you could keep your card with you when you swapped cars with the wife. Or when you went to a rental car.

They also could have had a system for storing "favorite channels" on the card and such.

Re:These are easy to hack

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell your friend who "clones" subscriptions that he is a SCUMBAG of monumental proportions. I hope he ends up in prison. If he or she likes the service tell them to buy stock in the company and make some real money.

NPR without pledge drives

[FocaJonathan]

• Sirius Radio has an exclusive relationship with NPR
  
• Sirius Radio?s commercial-free music service can be yours for just $3 more each month than what XM Radio charges.
  

How about NPR with out pledge drives. WBUR in Boston already offers a "Sustainer" program where they bill your credit card monthly. If you join you should get to hear NPR without pledge drives, now that would be technology solving a problem!

Its the content, stupid....

[KoshClassic]

The bottom line with the success of these services will be a) Is the content actually good, where they'll play a song even if it isn't on a major label or performed by Brittney Spears, or am I going to have to listen to the same 75 songs programmed by mindless corporate drones over and over like I have to do on FM today? b) If they actually get part 'a' right, will they last long enough financially for word of mouth to help them achieve critical mass?

On a technical note, does anyone know the capacity of these systems in terms of the number of seperate channels they can offer?

Re:Its the content, stupid....

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out 3wk.com. Damn good internet broadcast radio. I'm sure there are plenty of other good music "stations" on the web. This XM/Sirius stuff seems to be just an expensive way to get that kind of content into a little gray box rather than the big bad Internet.

Re:Its the content, stupid....

[geekoid]

new media always goes through the same cycles.
1st. fewer to no commercials, lots of variety, some reallgood.
2nd. more commercials, the really good stuff stays, everything moves toward the same blandness.
3rd.. being bland starts making serious money, and in comparison, the really good stuff doesn't seem to be bringing that big a a percentage
4th /. reports the death of the really good sat. radio station.
5th really good stations stay on the air another year, just to prove /. is wrong
6th. really good stations go away.
7th/. annous "the next tech" that promises to end bland boring sat. radio.
8th people still fail to relize the most money is in getting the most listeners, which means bland stations.

Re:Its the content, stupid....

[silicon_synapse]

Check their full channel listing and take a look at channel 52. Nothing but unsigned bands. XM seems to have a little of everything. If I here from someone with realworld experience that reception is pretty good in most places, I intend to get one.

Re:Its the content, stupid....

[Demonix]

Thanks for the link to thier channel listing.

Unfortunately, they don't have any channels for the music I listen to, so I will have to stick with MP3 and mix tapes/CDs

No industrial, no gothic, no deal. I'm not gonna pay for more music I don't listen to.

Re:Its the content, stupid....

[Anonymous Coward]

Ditto, they don't have most stuffs I listen to, and I listen to a wide variety of stuffs, just not a lot of pop. I mean, even when they talk about specific music genre, they are doing the "pop version" of it. To me, they are all channels of bubblegum music. Not worth my bucks.

Re:Its the content, stupid....

[Black Perl]

No industrial, no gothic, no deal

No trance, no ambient, no European techno; in fact, no electronic music at all other than "Urban Dance".

No celtic, no new-age, no acid jazz, no fusion...

Yet 15+ "Hits" channels. I can't believe it. I was certain they were going to cater to those who don't want the stuff you can hear anywhere.

Re:Its the content, stupid....

[Black Perl]

OK, upon further review, Ch 81 (BPM) is one that would appeal to me. But one channel is not nearly enough to justify the service. I'll wait to see what SiriusRadio has to offer.

Which one is Microsoft supporting?

[Mdog]

Because I'll look into getting the other :)

Now, many of you may see this post as a flamebait or a troll, but I'm being serious. You vote with your dollar too.

Dinner Poll

[Burritos]

What are you going to eat for dinner?

Please be honest. Thank you.

Due to excessive bad posting from this IP or Subnet, comment posting has temporarily been disabled. If it's you, consider this a chance to sit in the timeout corner. If it's someone else, this is a chance to hunt them down. If you think this is unfair, please email jamie@mccarthy.vg.

Single DIN

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there a Single DIN reciever out there that will allow people w/ double DIN cars and an AUX port on their Head Unit to benefit? I don't want the Star Trek looking sony thing on my dash...

Got XM. Love it.

[RocketScientist]

I have an hour commute every day. Combined with the occasional roadtrip, and I like having XM. When you add in the total suckiness of radio here in Kansas City, where we have one "All Pink Floyd, All The Time" station, one "Classic Rock" station and a whole crapload of Britney stations, some "Easy Listening" stations. No alternative. Not even any modern rock. They all suck.

I've got the pioneer equipment. It works well, it doesn't cut out, it sounds great. There are lots of stations with lots of different kinds of music.

I got it installed right before an 18 hour road trip. There's nothing like having music piped in for 9 hours at a stretch with no commercials and not having to change stations because "Another Brick in the Wall" came on AGAIN.

(Pink Floyd put out 20+ albums, why do radio stations insist on playing The Wall over and over and over again?)

The installation is painless, very similar to installing a remote CD Changer in your car.

Things I wish they had: Some kind of smart-card-ish way to bring a receiver into my house that doesn't cost as much as Sony's solution.

I'm very happy with the system right now.

-rs

The fate of these birds....

[snatchitup]

Will be similar to Motient's (formerly American Mobile Satellite) birds. XM Radio's beginnings actually spawn from AMSC. Some pretty top notch telecom guys in this area went to AMSC, and XM... These guys have been successful selling wires, buy can they sell birds? Hmmm...

They'll be re-positioned over Africa or some other third world nation providing them an instant communications systems, that otherwise, would be torn down by gorrillas (fighters).

If you look at their sales forecasts, they're in the thousands, in reality, should be 100's. They need millions to be listening. These birds are very, very expensive.

There's another service coming down the pike called AirTV... It's digital satellite TV broadcasted directly to Airplanes. (The EM-Wave theory has to account for the differing altitudes, Ionisphere and all that. It's complicated stuff). It was complicated in figuring out how to broadcast to moving targets... With Satellite TV, you've got to point your attennas at the birds.

Even if every /.'er got the service, it still would'nt be enough.

I hope I'm wrong, and that it works out.

Re:The fate of these birds....

[Ledge]

Isn't the airTV thing already available in some form? I recently saw a program regarding the construction of Airstream corporate jets. In that, they mentioned that the aircraft had satellite TV service. Not sure of any details beyond that.

Re:The fate of these birds....

[snatchitup]

Would be depending on altitude. But no... AirTV I think is backed by the Frogs.

In-flight TV for the most part, is just a bunch of VCR's.

There have been some other less elegant ideas put forward to have the equivelent of SatCom delivered by a constant fleet of plains flying around.. ELEOS... Extreme Low Earth Orbiting Satellite.. Saudi Arabia was really serious about doing this.. They may have already.

Re:The fate of these birds....

[Anonymous Coward]

"
They'll be re-positioned over Africa or some other third world nation providing them an instant communications systems, that otherwise, would be torn down by gorrillas (fighters).
"

you mean guerillas.

Audio books & Howard stern on the road...

[disc-chord]

I completely agree. I can't see myself investing in an XR or SR tuner when I have already put money into my car mp3 player. Especially when my car Mp3 player can do so much more than either of them can... such as playing pirated audiobooks. In my experience no long comute is complete without an audiobook to take you along on your journey.

Plus my mp3 collection has gotten larger than most radio station archieve's... so I'm not exactly hurting for new musical content.

The killer app of satalite is more apt to be something we can't already get. Such as Howard Stern live (or delayed for the west coast). You can grab it off the newsgroups a day late... but it's not the same thing as listening to it live. And considering how limited his and other radio personalities' markets are, satalite could bring them into alot more homes/cars.

I've been doing alot of traveling in new england lately, and haven't been able to hear howard since I left NYC. I would be more than happy to pay $10-20/mo to get Howard and other original content anywhere I go. But not just for music... you can find music everywhere you go in North America already.

Re:Audio books & Howard stern on the road...

[karnal]

Quote:

"I can't see myself investing in an XR or SR tuner when I have already put money into my car mp3 player." and "such as playing pirated audiobooks."

While I am definitely an advocate of a radio system where the quality is near cd (read - good as minidisc...) and there are more channels to listen to, then I'd be good to go. Except people do like the free things, and while I hate commercials as much as the next person, I'm sure that at some point they (the first ones to implement such an infrastructure) have ongoing bills as well.

I probably won't buy into it (because of the subscription model), and I'm sure many people on this site won't either. If it's easier and cheaper to get plain-old-FM, why spend hundreds more (initial year cost?). Quality doesn't win everyone over.

I know this is a rant, but why hasn't anyone instilled a scheme where something lossy (mp3? vbr?) can be "streamed" to the radio? I understand that you can't do any sort of handshaking etc., but you could do something such as retransmitting the same 5seconds of audio within a 1sec time period, for 5 seconds, then send the next 5 etc. Sort of for a buffer, and to make sure that you don't drop any music (except for under the harshest of conditions)...?

Re:Audio books & Howard stern on the road...

[TRyanC]

WBCN 104.1 MHz FM in Boston carries Stern.
They're on the web, too.

Re:Audio books & Howard stern on the road...

[Anonymous Coward]

Forget it. They aren't broadcasting the Stern show over the Internet.

Re:Audio books & Howard stern on the road...

[disc-chord]

Yea... only way I was getting stern before was on pirated ShoutCAST's ... but Infinity asked their good buddies at AOL to put an end to that real quick.

hackable?

[Anonymous Coward]

how long before this service is stolen? Who knows anything about the technology? I'm guessing you don't have to hook it up to a phone line...

Re:hackable?

[ackthpt]

Yeah, well, there's that DMCA thingie. Bet they're backers of that.

Re:hackable?

[germinatoras]

The way I see it, there are two possibilities. Think about it. This is a subscription service, but it also has ads. So either 1) They anticipate having eavesdroppers, and so they keep the ads in place to generate some revenue from these people, or 2) The consider that their protocol, or private key, or whatever it is that they use is secure enough to not be widely exploitable.

It's almost certain that someone, somewhere will figure out how to decode the audio stream. Let's say for example, that XM uses a public/private key pair to encrypt the datastream, with the private key residing in a firmware chip on each XM reciever. There will be some subscribers who will take apart their box, locate the firmware chip, and attempt to steal the key. Given enough time in the privacy of their own home, someone will eventually figure it out.

There might be some kind of kill-switch mechanism to prevent physical tampering - something that will erase the firmware under certain conditions. They might also have a remote kill-switch to disable a reciever via incomming satellite signals. (how else could they cut off your service, should you stop paying for it?) These things would be enough to discourage the vast majority of people from cracking their systems.

XM spent millions of dollars to set up a transmission infrastructure, they're not going to just let it get widely exploited.

Re:hackable?

[DavidTC]

They can't possibly have a remote kill switch, they're only sending out one signal. Well, they can have firmware in the box that will erase your firmware if it detects an erase code and your serial number, but there's no possible way they've detected you've hacked the thing in the first place, as it is one-way.

In other words, it's CSS all over again. They're handing out a signal, and you have all the time in the world to hack it.

It's actually more comparable to satelite stuff, except for the fact that you don't have an upgradable-on-a-card firmware, so they can't just change the signal and mail all the legit people new cards.

As for keeping track of subscriptions...I have no idea how they even do that. I suspect it's entirely in the box, aka, you tell them your serial number, they run it though some magical formula using it and the amount of time you purchased, and send it out, eventually, over the 'license' channel, which your box detects and activates itself. I doubt they're doing deactivations this way, though, because it would be easy enough to just unplug your box for a week after you stop paying, then plug it in. Or just create interference on the license channel. The box probably just keeps track of the time, and time on your subscription will just run out.

Which means, to hack this things, all you may need is a radio transmittor and a simple to code key generator. ;)

Re:NPR without pledge drives

[KoshClassic]

This is a brilliant idea - if some local non-profit / pledge drive oriented stations (like KCRW here in LA) partnered with these guys to bring subscribers some type of solicitation free listening on their stations they'd really be on to something... IMHO a lot of these non-profit stations are vastly superior to commercial radio but every few months they do a pledge drive and listening to them can get almost unbearable...

It's digital

[wiredog]

I don't recall the format though. But it does have the option of listing the titles. Haven't heard about searching, but the stations will be divided by genre.

I would NOT pay monthly for this...

[Controlio]

Sure this is great technology and all, but why should I be forced to pay $10/month for music I can get for free on regular radio? Sure it's not digital quality, but for the most part it's good enough. Plus, this new "digital satellite radio" can't be as robust as regular analog radio. What's going to happen everytime you go under a cement overpass or are sitting in a parking garage? Is my new fabulous digital solution going to "skip" 50 times on my average daily commute? Sorry, digital quality audio just isn't worth it if this is the case.

What's more, when I decide I want a song in digital quality, that's what I have my car minidisc deck for. I have an optical connection from my computer to my standalone minidisc recorder, and I record digital music (usually MP3s) to my heart's content, and take the minidisc into my car. Even in mono (~150min) it sounds absolutely perfect on my car stereo (6 speakers, 1 sub).

If they made a flavor of Satellite Radio with commercials that was FREE, then I might consider getting a satellite receiver. Until that time, I can't imagine getting one. In fact, when I hear my friends talking about getting a satellite radio, I chime in "Are you really going to pay $10 per month for radio?" and they immediately respond, "They charge a monthly fee??" It'll be interesting to see how much of the wow factor will wear off when people go to their car audio shop and find out there's a monthly fee for a car stereo.

I only see two ways for this to really take off. One option would be to add an extra $250 or $500 to each new vehicle pricetag, to act as a sort of "down payment" on the satellite radio service. That way, at least you get two years (or four) of the service "for free" with your vehicle purchase, and after that time you can decide if you want to stick with it or not. The only other option I see, is to stick some commercials in the service, and offer a free alternative. Put ads on the LCD, regular audio commercials, whatever is necessary... but I can guarantee you this, I would never, ever, pick up one of these stereos if I knew I would have to pay $10/month indefinitely just to USE that incredibly expensive receiver I bought. No way.

Re:I would NOT pay monthly for this...

[Wreck]

I agree completely with you. Moderator!

What's odd about satellite radio is they are attempting to do two big things at once: broadcast from satellites, *and* subscription based radio. It would make a heck of a lot more sense to just do one of those -- and the sensible one is satellite broadcasting.

Put up the satellites and create a dinosaur rock station (you know the station -- the place that plays Metallica now, but did not play them 10 years ago). Also create a country station, and a talk station or two, and a progressive rock station, etc. Just mimic what you find on the ground right now. Sure you cannot do traffic reports and local weather -- that's a cost. But your ad reach is huge -- advertisers will pay lots. And your running costs are minimal.

Another way to look at it: right now there seems to be at least one dinosaur rock, one "progressive" rock, one country, one... etc. station per city in the US, I would imagine at least 200 cities large enough. Imagine a business in which you can fire 99.5% of your labor force, and produce just as much output! And imagine that same output is worth 200 times as much to the customers! That's productivity!

I suspect the reason that the two satellite services are not providing ad supported free radio must be political.

Re:I would NOT pay monthly for this...

[pyite69]

Obviously you're not the target demographic then. The
target is people who can't stand the limited programming
available on FM, and people who don't like commercials.

Perhaps you live in a market that has good choices for
radio stations. Most big cities do not have this, and most
rural areas have limited choices.

Re:I would NOT pay monthly for this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Put ads on the LCD

Wow... that would be SUCH a bad idea. You get a seductive ad for a new beer with this really hot semi-naked girl and BOOM, you're dead on the side of the road after overturning four times.

Re:I would NOT pay monthly for this...

[Anonymous Coward]

> Sure this is great technology and all, but why should I be forced to pay $10/month for music I can get for free on regular radio?

Just who is "forcing" you to pay for a subscription-based service?..

Reason to care: Your music is lame

[Mdog]

Seriously, the point of the radio is to get exposed to new music. Call me a teenie-bopper, but I have discovered shit that I like by listening to the radio.

US lagging again??

[martin]

I hate to brag but we've had Digital radio in the Uk for a while now..

http://www.bbc.co.uk/digitalradio/

Of course we have slightly less red tape to go through, but it's interesting wrt to broadcast/cellphones how you guys in the US seem to lagging behind other countries. I guess making the frequencies available is the main problem??

Re:US lagging again??

[shemnon]

Let me offer a translation for the American folk out there....

America Sucks and the UK rules!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/digitalradio/

We don't have to deal with the man, or bobbies with guns. With all of your Japaneese TVs and Finnish wireless phones why can't you guys keep up ? (Eeven if the technology was created in America, we make it better.) Why can't you just use whatever frequencey you want? The people that own those ranges aren't paying up anyway, so just squat!

Re:US lagging again??

[zulux]

Er.. I woulden't be bragging. The Psion Wavefinder was such a flop, it caused them to have to abandon development of their new PDAs due to the massive loss of capitol incurred.

BTW - I'm enjoying an unlimited highspeed internet connection for $45 (27 Pounds) a month, Hows BT doing with yours. (duck)

Re:US lagging again??

[Anonymous Coward]

Alright that's it !! Get off the internet now :)

Re:US lagging again??

[Dix]

They've had digital radio in the US for years.
We're talking digital SATELITE radio.

Re:US lagging again??

[Anonymous Coward]

In Europe similarly to the UK, digital radios are mostly available free-to-air (FTA) without any subscription.

Re:US lagging again??

[trash eighty]

digital radio available over satellite has been available in the UK for years, on Sky Digital

XM radio, same bad music as local radio

[DeMorganLaw]

Satellite Radio really does not provide any more advantages than regular old FM band Radio. For 150$, and 12$ a month I doubt I will be any happier than I will with what is on the free airwaives right now. No radio station will ever appeal to the music I want to hear without mixing in crap half the time. The fact is, the best DJ in the world is yourself, I just burn the songs I want to listen to onto a CD and when it gets old I burn something else from my library of MP3s. Grow a spine and start listening to the music you like, don't put up with the crap that these radio stations want to feed you as trendy or cool.

Re:XM radio, same bad music as local radio

[mccalli]

I just burn the songs I want to listen to onto a CD and when it gets old I burn something else from my library of MP3s.

Then how will you ever discover anything new?

Cheers,
Ian

Re:XM radio, same bad music as local radio

[DeMorganLaw]

Gnutella, if I find something new and it isn't crap, ill go out and buy the album. I could also walk into record store and see what they have. Been probably over a year since I last did that though.

"Hype"???

[decipher_saint]

I've heard about satellite radio on and off for at least five years now, but there was no "hype" (directed towards MY demographic at least :-\ ). IMHO, satellite radio is great for people in out of the way places or who are on the move all the time, but is this a large enough market to justify the amount of money it takes to pay for upkeep?

I Care!

[ackthpt]

I spent Thanksgiving week driving from Santa Cruz, CA to Death Valley to Grand Canyon to Sedona to Meteor Crater and back. There were a lot of dead spots, where satellite radio could fill in, if the broadcasts can cover such a large area. In particular, I was insensed that there were about 200 stations carrying Talk Radio while Nebraska was being spanked by Colorado, and (though not a grad of either school) being a big College Football fan, there was just an ESPN station which filled the gaps with updates. I'd really go for a service like this for continuous following of music, sports and news when driving. Even clear channel stations get lost in nearby mountains. I think it's great.

The only downside I see is the monthly subscription fees. I just don't want another tap into my wallet. Pay it once or get advertisers to foot the bill. I'm OK with ads, so long as they don't get old or insultingly lame.

Re:I Care!

[AB3A]

Yours is a reasonable application of this technology. Unfortunately, I don't think there can be 4.5 million others like you.

Like most folks, I can count the number of such trips I take each year on my fingers. I am not going to subscribe to a satellite service at a price like that unless I was using it at least a few times every month.

In any case, an alternative to this has existed for many years and everyone has ignored it: It's called short-wave radio. You won't find a single major store that sells short-wave radios for the automotive market. But companies like Sony do make and sell quite a few such radios in various markets overseas.

No, the real problem is that folks are looking for talent and local content. But you won't find much of that in government, and you won't find much of that in the morass of corporate conglomerates that own much of the radio spectrum these days. It takes talent to recognize genius, but mediocrity knows nothing better than itself.

Lack of local content and regimented programming is why most listeners agree that most radio station programming sucks. But in these days where corporate ownership has homogenized the sounds of radio from city to city, when "local content" are bar ads, weather and news, when advertising dollars are sold nationally, when markets are going so "vertical" that variety is gone, where is there room for a Nationwide format?

I'd like to think there is a market for satellite radio, but I really doubt there will be.

7 Dirty Words

[Anonymous Coward]

Since this is a pay service, will the FCC still force ban the so called "7 Dirty words" or will this be like what HBO is to cable television?

Re:7 Dirty Words

[Stalemate]

I believe I read on the XM website that some of their stations are "uncensored", so I'm assuming that the "7 Dirty words" won't be banned.

This succeeds if it is sold in the car lot.

[barfy]

This needs to be sold like leather trim, and alloy wheels...

Wrap it into the cost of the vehicle and put it into the monthly payment. (And come up with a "lifetime price" like $300 dollars).

In the course of a few years you will start seeing tons of new subscribers....

Yes and No...

[linuxrunner]

I honestly believe that people will pay for such a convienence.
I personally would love to have music playing that doesn't cut in and out while I'm driving a long distance. Or trying to find a good radio station that doesn't play country way up in northern vermont or maine.

And no advertisements! yes, yes, yes!

But the real question is this: "Will the satelite radio compainies get enough subscribers to sustain themselves"

This is very important and should really be looked into first. I mean, so many wireless internet companies failed. We just saw @thome go under just recently, and they had a LARGE customer base.

Regretfully, very few companies could pull this off. And I firmly believe that the only ones who will, are the ones that are already established such as Time-Warner or Microsoft. They already have the capital and the means and they can suffer the losses that will incur for the early years of this new business cycle. Not some startup.

Rock and Roll?

[Havokmon]

So if they have to put two more satellites up, will they be named Sex and Drugs?

Re:Rock and Roll?

[Banjonardo]

Aaaaah, old usenet references that I wouldn't have gotten without the Jargon File. Nice.

Pricing

[chicagothad]

XM Digital Radio? Does it really matter if it is digital? My freakin' Chevrolet Cavalier is so damn loud even my CDs sound like crap. Why would I ever shell out $300 buck plus a subscription for one of these!

Drive from Denver to Vegas

[wiredog]

Few, if any, radio stations on that stretch of I-15. Ditto for the Vegas to LA run. Good stations in Vegas, but once you are over the ridges there's little or nothing.

I don't see that many people signing up for it

[Anonymous Coward]

I think there is a market for good radio. It's getting harder and harder to find with all the big companies buying up all the stations in markets and then using their computer generated charts to divide the market up. I don't see 60+ channels as the solution though, you still have to produce really good radio and then get people to buy it. Any more, I like a few DJs that I've listened to for years and think that it's just about perfect if it wasn't filled with so many commercials, I like the local feel. I'm not sure how you do that with national broadcast satellite radio.

The news stuff sounds kind of compelling, I could see some people going for that but $10-$12 a month seems a little too pricey seeing as how I can get probably 40 stations on my radio here, for free.

If you live in the middle of the west out in rural country or if you live in your car as a sales person it might be nice to have continuous stream all the time but that's not too many people.

A better interface is also needed. That's a different problem though but a big part of it in a car.

How many people pay for DMX?

Talk

[mblumber]

I wonder whether WestWoodOne will allow their talk to go over XM. I can't listen to Don and Mike and it's driving me nuts.

I want a Kerbango instead

[toupsie]

I would rather that 3Com bring back the Kerbango I wanted for months and months (I pre-ordered it from Amazon as soon as it was announced) and it was canned before it was released -- a victim of 3Com's Internet Appliance division. With CDs, car MP3 players (such as a 1,000 song iPod) and 5 AM talk radio stations, who needs Satellite Radio? I would have loved to have the 1,000s of channels of Internet radio from a Kerbango sitting on my desk instead.

Re:I want a Kerbango instead

[Anonymous Coward]

God I was lusting after a Kerbango too. What a disapointment.

Very old news here.

[Sarin]

I live in Europe and have digital satelite receiver pointed at the Astra and HotBird satellites. I receive about 700 digital radio stations here for over a couple of years now - what's the big deal? Well some stations do not have any commercials and stuff like that and they sound very clear, but most likely they're inside some subscriber program.. luckely I can upgrade my seca decoder with new codes, so there are no costs involved. Nonetheless I don't listen to the radio, I'd rather watch one of the dozen discovery or national geographic channels.

Economic Viability

[krez]

Let's take a look at the internet as an example: how many of you would be willing to pay for, say cnn.com, or google, or even /. as a service? Have "content providers" on the internet learned a lesson that applies to satellite radio?

I personally think it's neat, but I can't see myself paying for something that doesnt in any way "help" me.

Even the ACs are on crack today

[Anonymous Coward]

He didn't say anything about commercials, you idiot.

How about an in-car MP3 Satellite Stream Recorder!

[QuietRiot]

With in-car MP3

Perhaps they could offer a function by which you could turn a song you just finished listening to into an MP3 which you could listen to later.

I'm not sure how they could charge for this service considering it's a one-way communication link .....

But having an in-car MP3 recorder always recording with a back buffer of 5 minutes or so could come in handy for adding to that MP3 collection of your s the song you just heard!

I love hybridizing technologies!

Backup Satellite?

[shlamo]

"XM Radio uses two Boeing HS-702 satellites that are positioned over the East and West Coasts of the United States. The satellites, aptly named "Rock" and "Roll", maintain a geostationary orbit at 22,000 miles above the earth. XM Radio has a third back-up satellite on the ground should something go wrong in orbit."

A backup satellite that is earthbound? Hmm.. that's like having a backup harddrive lying on the floor next to your computer.

Re:Backup Satellite?

[Anonymous Coward]

>Hmm.. that's like having a backup harddrive lying on the floor next to your computer.

Nahhh, its like having a backup harddrive bolted to the floor cable side down. :)

Re:Backup Satellite?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hum, I think it may be the case of too much Neil Young. 'Rock and Roll will never die'

Where's my Rivo?

[daves]

What I really want is a product that record scheduled audio programming of interest and syncs it to a portable player. The source of the audio is not important.

Re:Where's my Rivo?

[Anonymous Coward]

My first (ok, maybe second or third) thought: since (a lot of/some) radio programs (except for news) are time-independent, what about a nice little utility that captured (internet or home-bound sat radio) audio, chopped it up into songs and stored it on an iPod during the night so yo can listen to it during the day?

one place it will do good.....

[the_2nd_coming]

is country clubs and resturants.
$10 per month is not a bad cost to get comercial free music pumped into your business.
no more tapes etc.

also, the car is probably the best place to put this system as well. the dealer can give you this option and with it, your monthly subscription is roled into your car payment. yes, you are paying for it, but psycologicly you don't feel it.

Re:one place it will do good.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? Do country clubs and restraunts currently pay more than $10/month for their commercial free music?

Re:one place it will do good.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes they do. I know the Taco Bell I worked for years ago paid $30 a month to Muzak for one analog mono music channel. It was a really crappy channel.

Is iPod the answer to every story these days?

[sulli]

Seriously, with iPod (or any MP3 jukebox) and a little cassette adapter, my music worries are over. OVER. No need for satellite or any other radio.

What I would pay for in my car is 100% reliable, commercial-free newscasts from BBC, NPR, and CBS News. Just the news, not the music. Someone make that happen for a lower price, and I'm there.

Re:Is iPod the answer to every story these days?

[toupsie]

Yes, yes it is...

Re:Is iPod the answer to every story these days?

[Vegeta99]

iPod is the solution to nothiung, its just another junk MP3 player that costs $400 and only works on Macs. For that price you could get an XM reciever and 20 months worth of programming, and you'd probably get to listen to some cool new music. So, with $400, you get an iPod and can't use it because you have no mac and no music anway, or you get an XM player and 20 months worth of music.

Re:Is iPod the answer to every story these days?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sirius offers a BBC feed along with an audio only feed from CNN headline news, fox news and about 5 other news only feeds. I find that the BBC feed that Sirius is currently offering is by far much better than any other american news service I have ever heard. I listen to it daily on my sirius reciever. Very nice!

Centralized Radio.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like Clear Channel Communication's wet dream. Each of these companies has complete control over their airwaves and has no obligation to let other content providers into their markets. Say goodbye to any sort of programming diversity-- if the satellite owners don't like it, it gets the boot (or more likely never makes it on the air).

So we get one hundred channels, each with a ten-hit playlist selected from the latest releases that the labels want to move. Great.

I'd like to see an upside to this, but I'm not sure if there is one...

That was my first thought . . .

[FatAlb3rt]

How long before it gets hacked?

I really ought to read up on them, but how are the units "enabled" when you buy a subscription? DirecTV has the phone line as a means of communicating, but I would assume these are receivers only.

$300 is a lot to pay for a radio. Yeah, no commercials (for now), and less station surfing, but a big fee upfront and a monthly fee? How long till the radio is free with a 2-yr subscription?

Re:That was my first thought . . .

[Maigus]

Wild ass guess: It's enabled the same way that Pay Per View cable works. Your receiver has a unit with a serial number associated with your account. You call and request that serial # (effectively) be activated and the satelite radio broadcaster dumps it in the out of band data stream. All units (powered) receive the out of band data, check against their own serial and (de)activate accordingly.

Re:That was my first thought . . .

[karnal]

What I was thinking was along the same lines -- How long until there is a newsgroup/irc channel etc where people "share" serials to program in?

Granted, this is definitely not going to be for the average "joe", but then again, neither is cracking software....

Re:That was my first thought . . .

[Mija Cat]

I don't have cable.
I don't have a dish.
I won't buy into XM or Sirius until I can get a "$400 for a lifetime subscription" deal.

Meow

I'd get one but...

[MarkusH]

the receivers are just too expensive. $10/month for subscription isn't terrible, but I am not going to pay $300 dollars (and those are the low end versions) for just the hardware (stereo system not included).

Now, once the receivers get down to $50-$100 price range, I'll consider it, but not until then.

Awesome!

[shepd]

Another American satellite communication that Canadians can hack legitimately!

Keep 'em coming America! We _love_ your kindness towards us!

I'm totally pumped about it!!

[Stalemate]

I see a lot of people saying that this isn't so great with mp3 players in cars now, etc, etc.

But, to me, this is the coolest thing. I commute about 1 hour each way every day to work. If I put in a new CD in the morning I've already heard it all the way through twice by the time I get home in the evening. It doesn't matter how many CD's/mp3's I have, everything always seems old to me with that much listening going on.

As far as local radio goes, it's OK, but no local stations really play any music I like, so I end up listening to the same old morning talk show every day and then 1 CD (all the way through) in the afternoon.

Playing MP3's in my car would be nice too, but it is about more than music to me. Looking at the XM station line up, I see lots of things on there tha I would like to listen to that just wouldn't be the same without being live. I really like the idea of listening to ESPN radio or The Discovery Channel.

Plus, I like my radio to be a little unpredictable! No matter how many mp3s I have, they are all gonna be stuff that I've heard before. Even on random play, after the first note or two, I know exactly what to expect. I like to channel surf, and listen to new things.

I think satellite radio is right up my alley.

Re:I'm totally pumped about it!!

[Anonymous Coward]

But how many more monthly fees can you handle?

Hmmmm 16 hours?????

[the_2nd_coming]

I don't know what they are thinking, 16 hours is not a good deal. why would I want to pay for a service that I can not use on demand?

XM got it right with the stationary satelites

Re:Hmmmm 16 hours?????

[frunch]

Having multiple satellites, however, means that the service should theoretically be available at all times.

Since they have 3 satellites operating on 16 hour orbits, they should be able to have 2 satellites available at every time (assuming they arranged them correctly).
Just have satellite 1 cover midnight-4PM, satellite 2 cover 8AM-midnight, and satellite three cover 4PM-8AM the next day.

Re:Hmmmm 16 hours?????

[Papyrus]

No....the service is available 24 hours a day. The highly elliptical orbit of the sats means that when a sat is over the US it will be so for a 16 hour period.

One thing I am curious about is how the receiver discriminates between satellite signals when more than one bird is in view - does it receive both (with the possibility of hearing a slight echo?)or does it lock one out somehow? Anybody know?

Re:Hmmmm 16 hours?????

[Anonymous Coward]

They have three satellites in orbit; two are visible to the radios at any one time. When one satellite sets below the horizon, another has already risen and taken over the setting one's signal handling.

Re:Hmmmm 16 hours?????

[Anonymous Coward]

If it works the same as digital cellular phones or differential antenna systems, your receiver will choose the strongest signal and "ignore" the other. I have ignore in quotes because it will monitor that other signal, and if it becomes the stronger signal, it will switch back.

Re:Hmmmm 16 hours?????

[Anonymous Coward]

There are a lot of VERY good reasons Sirius went with the highly elliptical orbit. XM has geosync sats, which means they are orbiting around the equator. This means they are low on the horizon (30-40 degrees usually) and easily blocked by trees. To compensate for this, they spent a TON on local repeaters. Of course this leaves a lot of gaps in less urban areas.

Sirius uses the HEO sats to get them more overhead. They live closer to 80-90 degrees overhead, and are blocked much less by trees and other obstructions. Plus, this orbit is lower than a geosynchronous orbit, which means they dont have to use as much power (XMs satellites needed to be so powerful they are some of the most powerful satellites every launched).

another byproduct is that with the HEO orbit, there is always 2 satellites in view at any gien time. One directly overhead, one beginning to set lowe on the horizon and one swinging around on the back side. The SR reciever can pick up 3 signals at any given time. 2 sats and 1 COFDM terresterial signal. It then combines the 3 signals for decoding.

IMHO, SR has a technically more robust system. It sounds good too! Check it out in a few months.

Re:Hmmmm 16 hours?????

[the_2nd_coming]

well, crap!!! I hope that Ford pick SR up...it sounds like they are the more Ideal for car travel(except in newyork or chicago or detroit where downtown has very little line of sight in any direction.

Re:I WILL pay for XM.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm paying for it. :-)

MP3 is interesting, but there are two problems with it: Audio quality (it sounds great on $8 PC speakers, but doesn't cut it on a good audio system) and it depends on me to take the time to record stuff.

I can spare $10 sooner than I can spare an hour to mess around with a CD burner.

I also like the selection. (but am also a little overwhelmed by it. Going to take a while before I can remember where the jazz stations are)

Being able to listen to BBC and other sources of information is great, too. Okay, I can't figure out exactly what the cricket scores mean, but it's nice to hear a different perspective on current events.

Outside of populated areas, you mean

[Spamalamadingdong]

ask anyone who has driven across Montana, Wyoming, and one or both of the Dakotas: There are literally miles and miles where you cannot get any radio at all.

Those are also areas where people are also spread very thinly. You're not going to pay for your satellite network with 15% of those people; you're going to need 3% of the suburban drivers. U-Hauls are the same, people don't use them often enough to make it worth putting a sat radio in it. Those things usually don't even have cassette decks, let alone CD players. (Yes, I have way too much experience with rental trucks.)

Long-haul truckers are probably a solid market, but I don't know how many of them there are or if they'd make a big difference in the bottom line.

Re:Outside of populated areas, you mean

[stripes]

Those are also areas where people are also spread very thinly. You're not going to pay for your satellite network with 15% of those people; you're going to need 3% of the suburban drivers.

Yeah, but you can probably get a lot more then 15% of them. They were the early adopters for satellite TV too you know... (of course BUD's day has passed, but...). Now 90% of them may still leave you needing 2.5% of the suburban drivers, but I'm guessing you'll get more rural folks signing up then home subscribers in the near future.

Not that this is really to my taste, I have a ton of music channels on my dish, and hardly ever bother.

Re:Outside of populated areas, you mean

[ZxCv]

I don't think it will be an overnight switch, but I can see it being standard on rental trucks in the next couple years.

A good buddy of mine used to work at Budget truck rental checking the trucks in and out. When he was at that location, I think they maybe had 1 truck that had a working radio--the rest had them, but didn't work for 1 reason or another. So what did he hear from practically every person that rented a truck? "Is this radio broken? I can't get it to work." It drove him nuts for a couple of months before he quit because every schmuck going through there to rent a truck had the same comments or question on the radio.

Just on that, I always figured that people used radios a lot when driving rental trucks. And since then, having moved 3 times myself with big rental trucks, I can definitely agree with it. Like I said, I don't see the rental truck companies moving to this en-masse, but I see new rental truck models being produced with them and eventually even partnerships between Uhaul or Budget or whoever and the satellite radio companies.

Re:Outside of populated areas, you mean

[thogard]

The truck rental compaines will get the new radios just as soon as one of the braodcasters promote their high tech marketing solution and come up with a "U-haul truck" station.

Think of the joy you will have of a a station with 24 hrs of short cheesy music followed by the voice over guy saying "Please check over head clearance when before refueling"...10 seoconds of music..."Remember most U-hual trucks are too large to go through most fast food drive throughs"...music..."In an unhappy home? Always moving? join our frequent mover program and rent 8 trucks and get one weekend free!"

XM radio poor bitrate

[Anonymous Coward]

I had XM radio, I took it back. Simply put the quality was about the same as 96Kbit Mp3. It had great selection the music was awesome. The no commercials ruled. But everytime a song I liked came on and I cranked it up, the lack of quality and compression artifacts drove me away.

Re:XM radio poor bitrate

[rschwa]

Thanks, you've answered my question. My local cable 'fabulous digital-quality music' channels are utterly unlistenable, I figured this would be the same.

Target audience?

[mr.buddylee]

Who is the supposed to appeal to? I personally wouldn't use it with a 10 minute commute, even with a 30 minute commute, I can't justify $10/month for the radio.

Also, do you think this will appeal to the soccer moms of america? or the older population? Too technical maybe or just not worth it?

He said "are more than 200 million registered vehicles in the United States" but to reach their number they still need 4.5 million of those? Are there 4.5 million people ready to chuck out $10/month with the uncertainty of the economy?

I hope they do well, but I personally think they're about a year too late. A year ago, everyone wanted a new gadget, now, I don't think thats the case...

Re:Target audience?

[Anonymous Coward]

Last I heard, so far XM is currently in the low 1000's as far as paid subscribers go.(please correct me if anyone has better numbers than I do) I doubt they'll be able to survive the 3-4 years it will take until this could be a standard feature in car and home radios. The cost of putting their systems in place along with developing the formats(they hired quite a few established radio personalities and producers) has to have put them into such a hole that bankruptcy is in the future unless something happens quickly. After that, don't be supprised to see a company like AOL/Time-Warner buy them on the cheap with the infrastructure in place and rerelease the service in a similar form. How many of you would sign up for the service if the recievers were at no or low cost?

Re:Target audience?

[stripes]

How many of you would sign up for the service if the recievers were at no or low cost?

Not me, I would have to give up my 3 CD in dash player with all kinds of Dolby crap. If it was already built in, or if the replacement also did all the crap my existing "radio" does and was free including install then sure, I would sign up for a month and decide if I liked it.

I think a lot of people are in a sort of similar boat (willing to sign up for a month if the receiver incl. install was free -- I'm not so sure others have my "high standards" for a replacement "radio").

I doubt they'll be able to survive the 3-4 years it will take until this could be a standard feature in car and home radios.

I thought GM was going to include it standard on many cars, and as an option on pretty much all of them starting "real soon now". Plus last time I looked at car radios over half of them seemed to have XM, a lot more then could do "CD MP3".

another interesting satellite radio: WorldSpace

[schenkus]

There is another very interesting satellite radio service: WorldSpace

There are 3 satellites, on each for
- Africa
- Asia
- South America

The african satellite can be heard in most of europe, too.

There are news in a lot of languages (reuters, bloombergs, bbc, radio france, ...) and also local (african, asian, south american) stations which play a lot of music.
Music is encoded as 128kb MP3, in addition you can also sign up for some "receive only" internet service - where some internet sites get downloaded into a local cache on your machine. This is most interesting if you are in a place without a reliable data connection.

For europeans, this service is interesting mostly because the music played by the african channels is quite different to the music european stations play - and the transmission quality is much better than short wave radio.

You have to get a special receiver to decode the signal, but you don't need a big dish.

See http://www.worldspace.com

If you just want to hear music and/or news, you don't have to signup anywhere.

Re:another interesting satellite radio: WorldSpace

[neal_nelson]

Just to clarify a few points: the South American setellite hasn't been launched yet but the other two are both operational. The Asian satellite covers from India across to China and down to just above Australia. It can be received in Australia but you need a large dish to do so. Within the footprint the little patch antennas on the receivers are usually enough.

Music is encoded as MPEG 2.5 layer 3 at various bitrates between 32k and 128k depending on the content and required quality.
This sounds better than you'd expect as MPEG 2.5 layer 3 is more optimised to low bitrated than MPEG 1 layer 3. The XM radio stuff is in the same format I beleive. I think it was a spinoff of Worldspace a few years ago.

It's worth a listen to if you can get hold of a receiver. I quite like Bob, which is a free to air Worldspace branded channel. These are also streamed over the net but I'm not sure if you can get access outside of the company yet.

Re:another interesting satellite radio: WorldSpace

[Anonymous Coward]

They actually use MPEG 2.5 AAC encoding opposed to MPEG 1 layer III or layer II used in DAB.

It's a little more advanced.

Don And Mike show....

[ender_wiggins]

I would pay 10$ a month for this show, and I know that they have a following that would also pay. Maybe howard stern? G Gorden Liddy? Fun talk shows rule.

thinking outside the box?

[frunch]

I hate to use business-speak, but these people really need to learn to think outside the box.

Why not:
- carry the signals of existing radio stations via satellite, and charge the radio stations to carry their signal.
- carry small college radio stations (I'd be willing to pay for that)
- use some sort of ID3-type tagging to show information about the song, artist, etc. Not knowing who did a great song I just heard is one of my top 10 pet peeves with radio. And don't get me started on that stupid Sony gadget.

Until then, I'll listen to regular FM during my morning commute. (Of course, I'm in DC, so I have a fairly good selection of radio stations already.)

It is still US radio stations...

[gosand]

Now if they could get something besides US radio stations playing US songs, it might be cool. I live in the Chicago area, and all the stations play the same crap.

Alternative (right): whine whine whine, teeny-bop pop.

Hip Hop : crooooayayanouuuuoo-ning garbage or the same beat with lyrics about 'tha street'.

Classic Rock : good songs that I have heard 1 million times. Hey, even Zeppelin gets old.

Light Rock : What the hell is this!?

Obviously, we aren't intelligent enough to listen to our own music in this country. We have to listen to what they cram down our throats. Maybe it is that way in other countries too, but at least it would be new (to us) music if we could listen to it.

Re:It is still US radio stations...

[Anonymous Coward]

What about all of the college radio stations in chicago? Loyola [88.7], Northwestern [89.3], Northeastern [88.5] and Columbia [88.1] ... all below the 90mhz on your dial. Also NPR [95.1]. I can reliably get everything except Columbia and I live on the north side. On the south side expect to only get Columbia NPR and Northwestern (rich bastards). College radio rules.

Re:It is still US radio stations...

[gosand]

Well, I live in the Suburbs (west) so technically I am not in Chicago. I can sort of get those stations, sometimes.

For non-Chicago people, Chicago is a good-enough generalization. For Chicago people, I am a suburbanite, not necessarily by choice.

Re:It is still US radio stations...

[Jack_of_Hearts]

Damn, you live in chicago and don't appreciate the beauty that is 93.1 XRT? I have no commercial association with them, to make that clear up front, but I haven't run across a better station in the country. Sure, it occasionaly turns into all Talking Heads all the time, but between Local Anesthetic, Sound Opinions, and the other kick ass shows they have on there, it's one hell of an alternative to the Q101 crap. Check it out.

DAB

[Anonymous Coward]

Terrestrial DAB has more potential and is already up and running in many countries, XM is only using 64kbps for stereo channels whilst you get around 192kbps for DAB, or 1.2mbps per mux.

another nice application......

[the_2nd_coming]

what if you could get a live audio feed from Cable stations? I would love to drive to work and listen to Fox News Channel so I can stay abreast of the national goings on. I hate local crap because it is all just fluff. National cable news channels and other stuff that does not NEED to have a picture would be nice.

good idea, poor delivery

[avdp]

Why I will not be listening to satellite radio anytime soon:

- It's a subscription model, and yet I have to buy the equipment which is not cheap (other than the one car manufacturer that includes it).

- It's a subscription model, yet there are commercials (on at least some channels)

- I have to dish out money for equipment and yet there is a good chance it will only work for less than a year. One company admitted that they have money to stay afloat until the end of next year. Which means, there is a good chance they will no longer exist a year from now since I think they're expectations on signing up 4.5 million subscribers is a bit optimistic.

Yikes. No thanks. You won't get me to take the gamble, at least not until they have been around for a couple years. Of course, if everybody thinks like me, they won't be around for a couple of years.

Um...

[Levine]

Okay, it sounds like you know what you're talking about with regards to this subject, but please:

What the hell did you just say?

This isn't a troll; I'd honestly like to gain a little insight into... whatever it is you wrote about.

Cheers,
levine

Re:Um...

[snatchitup]

First.... Bird = Satellite

I've been around awhile with regards to new Satellite services. I jded. Before they go up, they seem like Sliced Bread... The ideas are extremely compelling to a thinking person.

Did you know Fed Ex, once put up a satellite that was going to rid the need for Mail. They spent over $100M.. Basically, they were going to buy expensive printers, and use the satellite to transfer an image, and have it printed at the other end.. This was early 80's. Luckily, the main business grew incredibly.

But when it comes down to revenues, they usually dissapoint.

The engineers (including, usually engineering management) get blinded by the thrill of the awesome engineering project. They're really happy if they make 50 people happy with the service... But, these are multi $100M birds that need to be fed with revenues on the same grand scale, not to mention the allure of some R.O.I. (Return on investment)....

AMSC had the first North American Satellite Telephone license for Geosynchronous orbit satellite. Not enough people were buying the service. So they leased the birds to an African company. (They used the arsine(?) gas tanks that keep the thing in orbit to re-position the bird over Africa. Something that need to be making $300M/year is now maybe making $60M.

Why another new system?

[FeatherBoa]

What's up with the Americans that they can't do digital radio the standard way like everyone else?

DAB is the future of radio. Get with the program guys!

slashdot and browser neutrality

[ThwartedEfforts]

I sure would love it if slashdot was browser and OS neutral and would either edit the articles or not accept them before publication if they can not be rendered correctly on operating systems other than Windows. The number of (apparently) MS-sanctioned smart-quotes in this article is absurd. I know I can install editing proxies, other fonts or what-have-you to take care of this on my end, but this is slashdot, and doesn't fix the problem at its root.

Or did I miss a memo and we are actually susposed to support MS smart-quote "standard" now? I'm sorry, but the single quote is ascii 0x27 (use it in conjunction with ascii 0x60 if you like).

What about us sports junkies?

[e2d2]

What about me? The sports junkie? I could listen to sports events/talk the entire time I'm in the car. My commute lasts about an hour each way so I love listening to the sports channels. The only problem is there's only one FM sports talk show on and they dont have live coverage. I need to switch to AM for that. All though many on /. would like to think that the world is filled with others like them, the fact is everyone on here is most likely the minority. Some, myself included, would spend $10 /month getting live coverage of sports/news events.

It requires a couple of things

[AugstWest]

1) It would require something different from regular radio. I'd like to be able to listen to all-reggae, or all-cuban -- don't replicate the crap that already smothers the radio dial

2) No commercials -- if I'm paying for a monthly service, i don't want to hear any ads. (this alone would make it worth a monthly fee)

3) A low monthly fee. I currently pay about $5-10 a month already to a local community-funded radio station (http://www.wpkn.org -- check it out, they kick ass). I wouldn't pay more than $10 a month, and honestly $7.50 seems a fair price.

4) Cheap/free hardware -- noone is going to pay a lot of money for hardware that may very well be obsolete in 6 months to a year.

Needs 3 and 4 are the toughest ones to meet, I think. Especially when following 2. I'd love to see someone pull it off, though, and I'd definitely have one installed in my car.

What's REALLY on our minds...

[tomzyk]

1. How does the monthly subscription work? Like DirecTV cards? Is there a cellular modem in each radio? Do you have to type in a security code at the beginning of each month?

2. [the important one] How long will it be until we can download the instructions from the net on how to build one of these puppies on our own from parts from RadioShack?

Another pocket-grabber...

[rkischuk]

I'm becoming progressively disturbed at the number of companies trying to get into your pocket every month. Fair-use as we know it for almost any device seems to be going away, and NONE of it is customer-driven. Look at the trends.

Soon, you will pay monthly for your software (Microsoft - others will follow suit), radio (XM/Sirius), music (online music services that give you access to large song catalogs but remove all access to music when you cancel), movies (divx tried to start it, big $$$ is picking up the idea now), books (M$ vision for e-books w/ DRM), video games (Final Fantasy XI), web sites....

What was wrong with existing revenue models? Just because companies like Microsoft were incapable of creating software worth the cost of updating, it screwed up their revenue predictions.... Why should consumers get screwed just so a company can predict their profits more accurately? Why can't I just buy something and own it anymore? I can't tell you how much this pisses me off.

What's the common thread here? Huge footholds in the industry or sanctioned monopolies (MPAA, RIAA, M$, XM/Sirius). Preach all you want about speaking with your dollars, but that only works while you still have a choice. What happens when we don't have access to the alternatives any more because of coersion of distribution channels, anti-competitive practices, and purchased legislation?

Re:Another pocket-grabber...

[Alpha_Geek]

Sirius Radio also offers 100 channels (60 commercial-free music and 40 news, sports, talk, and entertainment programming).

This is why they charge a monthly fee. I don't hear anyone complaining about HBO charging a monthly fee. If you don't want to pay for it, don't use it. Its that simple. Normal radio broadcasts won't go away. Broadcast TV didn't disapear because of cable and satellite.

Re:Another pocket-grabber...

[rkischuk]

Sirius Radio also offers 100 channels (60 commercial-free music and 40 news, sports, talk, and entertainment programming).

This is why they charge a monthly fee. I don't hear anyone complaining about HBO charging a monthly fee.

HBO doesn't require you to buy a separate cable box. They have NO lock-in on you except for their home-brewed programming (Sopranos, Sex in the City, etc.) You can rent the same movies, catch them on a different channel, or borrow them from a friend.

These guys have a government-sanctioned oligopoly and some serious lock-in. What prevents both companies from doubling their monthly fees or adding 20 minutes of commercials per hour? Nothing - look how people have been grudgingly accepting obscene TV-cable rate hikes.

What prevents ClearChannel, Cox, or Infinity from snapping these companies up if they run low on cash? What happens if they start degrading the quality of their broadcast stations in order to upsell people to satellite radio (exclusive songs, promotions, lower commercial %, etc). What happens when a ClearChannel-owned XM pays Honda scads of money to drop support for AM/FM-radios? It can very easily happen, and it pisses me off. The moronic masses will consume as usual until the market share is large enough to screw those who have been holding out.

Re:Another pocket-grabber...

[Alpha_Geek]

What prevents both companies from doubling their monthly fees or adding 20 minutes of commercials per hour?

Nothing, but they will lose a lot of business if they do that.

look how people have been grudgingly accepting obscene TV-cable rate hikes.

And alot have moved to satellite for just that reason.

What happens when a ClearChannel-owned XM pays Honda scads of money to drop support for AM/FM-radios?

I find that pretty unlikely. Every TV sold today (save some very high end monitors) still has a broadcast tuner built in. People are very attached to their local programming. That was one of the biggest concerns with DirecTV. People still want what they have been getting, they just want more in addition to it.

The moronic masses will consume as usual until the market share is large enough to screw those who have been holding out.

Like people who still use VHS are getting screwed right now? Or people who still buy analog audio tapes? Most new titles are still sold in both these formats. Technology in the mass consumer space never moves that fast. There is always a significant period of overlap. Maybe XM will take over one day, but by then there will probably be competition within XM, or competing satellite radio networks. I wouldn't cry wolf just yet.

Re:Another pocket-grabber...

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed, why should they improve or even support free broadcasts when they can make more by forcing people to subscribe to a closed system? My main reason for getting cable in the first place was because the signals from TV stations were so poor. I'm sure with the ubiquitousness of cable service the broadcasters would ditch the airwaves if it wasn't for the FCC. If you can't afford all these monthly fees or don't get cable too bad, we don't want your poor demographic anyway.

As for content they can barely fill up the cable channels with anything worth watching. Out of all the extra channels I have to pay for I only watch 6 or so. I don't see how they'll fill up 100+ channels except with 90+ channels of crap.

As for monthly fees for using products (Windows, divx, etc), why are we allowing companies to have a monopoly on ownership? We're painting ourselves into a very scarey corner.

Re:Another pocket-grabber...

[the italian]

HBO requires you to buy a tv if you don't have one. If you already had the XM equipment you wouldn't have to buy it. HBO is the same as this service.. You choose to get it or not. If you buy a car with the product in it.. you don't have to use it.

Re:Another pocket-grabber...

[dasmegabyte]

You forgot the worst part of it all: most of these subscription services force you into a yearly contract where it costs more to get out than to stay in.

Why is this important? Because it takes away the most basic consumer right: the right to good service. A company that you are forced into paying every month has no reason to give you good service. They have no reason to deliver on their promises, because they know you don't have the clout to resist payment or break the contract.

Other subscriptions make us wary to use real services by hiding the ability to cancel. I've had a couple services keep charging me even after I'd cancelled...seems they "lost" my cancellation request. Nobody wants to go through the hassles of recouping money just to hear slightly better radio or play an online game...which is why subscription models, unless undertaken cautiously, are severely flawed.

Re:Another pocket-grabber...

[leviramsey]

And alot have moved to satellite for just that reason.

DirecTV is a no-brainer. I was paying $45/month for crappy cable (analog, no MTV2/Fox News/Comedy Central). I now get DirecTV for c.$40/month, with the above listed channels, plus even more. The only advantage cable might have is the 'net connection (if you're in a community that has that).

we want... talk...?

[bienfaissant_digital]

i dont know about you, but when the guy was saying that people want to hear news and what life was like when the song was coming out, i was just about ready to throw up. all that i want is music and the name of the song and group in case i dont already know. and the music keeps on playing on and on... no talk, no commercials.

You are the exception

[ackthpt]

I will not pay $10 a month for the 'right' to listen to more commercials.

Oh, how I recall these words from the dawn of Cable TV. I guess nobody cared, as there's piles of successful channels and more everyday and most with commercials. Basic Cable cost about $15 a month in 1975 when they rolled through my town, in Michigan, and laid that fat cable and buried little green boxes.

My dad wouldn't dream of footing the bill to pay for something he already got for free, and having commercials in that pay-for content as well. Times have changed. He's got Cable and uses it a lot. He's a regular viewer of America's Team (the Atlanta Braves), History Channel, A&E, CNN, you name it. Him and half the country are wired for cable.

You're entitled to take your stance, but remember others see the practical side and value of it. I'd say it's a pretty good deal, but only if I get to hear the kinds of broadcasts I like. Consider this like the early days of Cable. It's actually pretty crude, what they're offering. I expect it to expand considerably.

Re:You are the exception

[WinDoze]

I think the major difference in my personal little world is that I feel I *NEED* TV, but I definitely don't fell like i *NEED* radio. There are certainly plenty of people out there who won't agree with me on that statement, but I'm willing to bet that there are a whole lot more who would agree with me. I like TV at home to be entertained (via mindless drivel) and informed (via CNN, Learning Channel, etc.). The only time I ever listen to radio is in the car, and if I had to pay for it, I'd just pop in a CD and leave the radio off. I really wouldn't feel like I was missing anything.

Re:You are the exception

[gmhowell]

The trick is that he is paying for CNN, A&E, etc. Would your father still pay if he only got the local over the air stations?

I know I wouldn't, and I (shamefully:) admit to watching a hell of a lot of tv. But about 50% of it is NOT on ABC, CBS, etc, etc. It's on Discovery, Nick at Nite, Sci-Fi, etc.

Re:You are the exception

[zeda]

Cable TV generates new unique content.
Radio just plays music that is available elsewhere.

Sports and news are exceptions. About the only thing created just for radio uniquely is talk.

Re:You are the exception

[ackthpt]

The trick is that he is paying for CNN, A&E, etc. Would your father still pay if he only got the local over the air stations?

The point is, it isn't just the local. It's more, that's why people buy it, same could be said for XM and Saltire. Bottom line: Is the more worth the change in cost, from free to ~$10/mo.

Re:You are the exception

[Black Perl]

Cable TV generates new unique content. Radio just plays music that is available elsewhere.

Yes, but:

• I like to hear new music that I haven't been exposed to before.
• NONE of the 4-5 genres of music I like to listen to is broadcast on the radio where I live.

This is reason enough for me to get it, particularly with the receiver that can move from car to home. I'm sure there are many others in the same situation.

If there were more independent radio stations and less corporate crap, this wouldn't be necessary.

Re:You are the exception

[gmhowell]

I now see what you are saying. Okay. Understand.

To answer the question: I think it's wait and see at this point. Until they broadcast for a few weeks/months, what is the programming really like? How is the quality?

Personally, I'm quite interested. Not for the car (my commute is about 8 minutes) but for home. HOA prevents aerials (and I'm too lazy to put one in the attic) and the local cable doesn't carry radio stations over the coax (and I refuse digital cable, as I won't have a decoder box, nor do I want to pipe radio signals through my TV just to go out the stereo).

But, at $300 for a unit? I don't think so. I'll let some early adopters decide which company will win, and force them into "sign up for a year, and get the decoder/receiver for free".

Then we can talk.

Free "standard" and non-free "premium" service!

[QuietRiot]

Why not offer some radio services for free - with advertisements - and premium commercial-free versions for those that'd like to pay.

This would allow advertising to flow into people's ears even if they weren't paying for service, but still had a in-dash receiver.

Not to say I want advertising, but if I ever decide to cancel my subscription that's only usable on a $400 radio, I'd like to be able to use it for _something_.

It wouldn't cost them any _more_ to broadcast a few non-subscription streams (except perhaps for a few paid "channels") and it might get some people who have the units, but have either not yet subscribed, or canceled their subscription, to sign up (again).

commercials and DJs

[Tibor the Hun]

i've stopped listening to radio for 3 major reasons:
-numbnut DJs
-annoying ads (hire a fsckn advertising major, for crying out loud) and
-the fact that each station loops through what seems like only 12 songs.

i like my mp3s, but sometime its nice to have some unexpected variety, and this form of radio might be the way to go...

You won't pay for radio but you pay $80 for TV?!?

[GizmoToy]

Ok, so lets think about this for a second. You pay for TV with commercials, You pay for the internet with what basically amounts to commercials, You paid to have an "electronic gizmo" installed in your car that will eventually serve up commercials while you are driving, but for some reason you won't pay for radio with commercials? Your argument makes absolutely no sense. It was pretty much a given that someone in the radio business would come to the conclusion to charge for service, just like television before it. This is no different than TV. On top of that Sirius's system is entirely commercial-free.

I'd say this service has quite a bit to offer anyone who regularly listens to the radio, and some that dont. 100 channels anywhere in the Nation is a lot better than the 20 channels we get here, I know that for sure, and with genre-divided channels, I won't have to worry about hearing any damned Backstreet Boys songs while I'm groovin to BT... oh wait, nevermind...

That's a lot of work!

[Gorimek]

I could never find the time to find and listen to new music, manage a playlist and load all the current songs into my MP3 players even if I had the inclination to do so. That must take hours every day. I'd be very happy to pay $10 a month for someone else to do that for me. Plus all the news, traffic info and different talk shows.

My only concern is whether they actually produce good channels. I have satellite TV with 30 chanels of non stop "radio" music, but they are pretty lame. It's all in the execution.

Hey Moderators!

[Whom The Bell Trolls]

This guy is a known troll, look to his sig for more information.

Mod the bastard down!

Broadband Internet

[sterno]

They've apparently got enough bandwidth for one-way broadcast of approximately 100 digital audio channels. There's not nearly enough there for doing two-way internet service of any reasonable bandwidth.

75?

[JimTheta]

...or am I going to have to listen to the same 75 songs programmed by mindless corporate drones over and over like I have to do on FM today?"

It doesn't seem like that many. I'd venture 40 songs, tops, are on the active playlists of modern rock stations, of which 10 are on the heaviest rotation.

-Grant

How long before 'no-subscription' radios appear?

[ddstreet]

Really, since this is one-way (broadcast only) radio, how long do they think it'll take someone to reverse engineer a XM receiver and build a knock-off receiver? I'm sure they'll try to take them to court or just have 'em shut down, but is this XM stuff really the same as cable, where you legally can't receive the signal without paying for it? And, is the consumer (who illegally listens) or the box producer (who makes no-subscription boxes) breaking the law?

I guess from a DMCA point of view, it's the box manufacturer. After all, no-subscription boxes would be 'cirucmventing' the access control to copyrighted material - the broadcasts...

Ignore this....

[Anonymous Coward]

*yawn* more crapola that someone wants me to pay a monthly fee for? *yawn*...

Why would I want to buy a receiver and then pay a montly fee, just to listen to something for maybe 1 hr a day?

My radio is already OFF 95% of the time anyway. I only have it tuned into the AM station that has the traffic conditions on the "8's" (:08, :18:, :28...). I turn the radio on around the "7's", and off again at the "9's"... I could care less about the so-called "news", or the advertisements...

And I've got a couple of nice bridges to sell you on Io if you think this thing is going to remain commercial free. Didn't something up there say "less commercials". Ummm, I'm paying for this - I don't want ANY commercials EVER.

Oh wait, I forgot, for about $300 I can pick up an MP3 player, or hack up something with a hard drive in it and blow out tunes for say ummmm, 76 DAYS without a repeat just given the amount of music I have now... And ya know what? After 76 days, if I hear the same song - I'll be wanting to hear it again...

Screw this XM crap... Tell your car dealer to just rip it out and give you a normal radio or CD player... And take that On-Star junk with it...

Monthly fees are a way of life now...

[Arkham]

When did it happen? When did society move from a goods-based economy to a service-based one? I was reading the comments on this story, thinking about my cable bill going up again. How many things do we pay for with recurring costs these days? Let's see, here is my list:

1) Cable TV: no premium channels, now $42 a month
2) Cable Modem: $40 a month
3) TiVo: $10 a month
4) My cell phone: $30 a month
5) My wife's cell phone: $30 a month

That's $152 a month for junk I don't even need! And that's on top of:

1) my mortgage
2) car payment
3) car insurance
4) homeowners insurance
5) lawn care contract
6) trash pickup
7) termite contract ( I live in the south)
8) water
9) electric
10) gas
11) landline phone

Now we're talking $2500-$3000 a month or more in recurring costs.

Should I add premium channels, digital cable, more minutes on my cell phones? How much is it now? Do I want to add another $10 a month for XMSatelite, even if it is good?

This service-based stuff sucks. I bet some of you have even more things to add to the list.

Hey! That's pretty Insightful *HINT* *HINT*

[ackthpt]

Getting off the ethnocentric soapbox, I can dig. A large number of stations in California are hispanic broadcasts, with a sprinkling of chinese, hindu, and other languages. Being of an ethnic group where english isn't your primary language, you'd enjoy the opportunity to listen to broadcasts in your native tongue, or better, from a country other than the US (where information can be so limited, and we could go on about that all day)

With the end of atmospheric broadcast of the BBC in North America I'd like the chance to listen to the BBC again, or Radio Deutschewelle, etc.

Re:Hey! That's pretty Insightful *HINT* *HINT*

[AB3A]

With the end of atmospheric broadcast of the BBC in North America I'd like the chance to listen to the BBC again, or Radio Deutschewelle, etc.

You still can. I do. The only thing the BBC really cut was the Sackville, NB transmitter. Antigua is still very much on the air. 6195 kHz in the mornings, 5975 kHz in the evenings. And Radio DW is still on the air too.

No, the reason they've been shutting down SW transmissions is because they're under the mistaken impression that local coverage from various PBS stations and streaming audio coverage via the Internet is an economical substitute. They're wrong, of course, but they're still figuring that out.

Hi GiZer!

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like the tables have been turned. The trolls have turned to trollbusting! What's next? IP Bans and irc lockouts frm #geekizoid? How the self-righteous have fallen....

Re:Hi GiZer!

[Whom The Bell Trolls]

There are no trolls on GiZ. You are sorely mistaken.

I'd try it

[MasterBlaster]

But only if it had a Johnboy & Billy channel.

I can't listen to that anymore now that I moved up north.

MP3 makes it questionable

[benevolent_merchant]

I'd have to agree with the sentiment posted earlier that, given the existence of large capacity MP3 players, the XM radio is merely great technology without a practical use just yet.

Let's examine the details:

1)Price

XM - $150 installation min. + $10/month
NOMAD 20GB - $300, car adapters maybe $40 on top max

So if you use it for 2 years the NOMAD is already better financially.

2)Content

XM - 100 commercial free channels and news
NOMAD - Anything you want

The only disadvantage of the nomad is the lack of news, but being able to load it with your very favorite songs and customize playlists, or have random playback, etc. makes it a winner when you consider that news is something you can get on a standard FM or even AM radio.

3) Ease of use

XM - Nothing required
NOMAD - if you get a car adapter then nothing required, else must monitor batteries. But car adapter mentioned in price above

So XM wins by a hair here..

4) Reliability

XM - Normal satellite transmission is easily disrupted by bad weather.. I would not be surprised if it wer the case here

NOMAD - Quite reliable but maybe slighly more risk of mechanical failure.

It's a tie here.....

For me, the ability to customize content makes a hard drive mp3 player a "killer app".. I currently have the smaller nomad and it has become my best friend.

That doesn't stop me from wanting satellite tv over cable though.. the picture is soooooo beautiful!

Re:MP3 makes it questionable

[RocketScientist]

So, where are you getting the content for that Nomad?

Where was that again? Oh, you're either buying cd's and ripping them, or you're downloading them with Morpheus.

How much was that cable modem?

You say above that the content on your nomad is free. Don't forget you've also got to procure and download songs to it. That will probably take you more than a couple hours a month if you want a wide selection of current content.

How much is your time worth?

OK, now how much would it cost to legally procure and use that content?

Your analysis was great up until you got to that part.

What problem are you trying to solve?

[Walter Wart]

The technology is cool. No doubt about it. And the idea of not having to change your radio presets or hunt for stations on long drives is attractive.

But solutions running around in search or problems is a great way to go broke. As we saw after the Internet Bubble.

This article was very much from the 'supplier' side. As a possible consumer or satellite radio I have a few questions that will need some serious answers before I shell out a couple hundred for a radio and over a hundred a year for a service which I can get nominally for free right now.

1) Will the programming be any better? The choice of music on American radio has been getting worse and worse, more and more homogenized for a couple decades (cf. Clearcase). What guarantee is there that I won't be shelling out big bucks for the same crud?

2) One of the attractions of satellite radio is that you pay for it. So the provider doesn't have to underwrite the enterprise through advertising. So the customer doesn't get five minutes of commercials every seven-and-a-half minutes. The article spills a lot of ink about the opportunities for advertisers. Again the question, why pay a premium for the same annoying ads you can already get for free?

3) What sort of variety is there in the programming. The article points out that a lot of important genres aren't covered by regular radio offerings. Will the new providers actually do this? Or will they go for the most popular stuff and end up as an imitation of what is already out there (once again, already out there for free)? Will I be able to hear Samba, Afro/Pop, Chicago Blues and Bluegrass? Or will it be Top 40, "Classic" Rock, watered-down hip hop, and Country-Western?

Just like TV

[jeffy210]

Damn, this is going to be just like TV... 100 channels and still nothing good on....

XM Radio Rocks!

[rhaasch]

I bought XM Radio and put it in my car last month on a trip across the southern US. After driving from Yuma to Tucson with no decent radio reception, I broke down (not literally) and got it installed at Circuit City in Tucson. I then jumped back in the car and drove home to Florida. Not once did I lose the reception and I was driving through mountains, storms (remember last month's huge Texas thunderstorms?), and large cities (Houston, etc). I also livein Florida and it rains here often and I have yet to lose the signal. For those who don't know, the signal is also buffered by several seconds which keeps it from dropping out. It works great. The music selection is great. I can tell very few people here have actually researched the music offerings. The stations with commercials keep them short and under two minutes and you're back to the tunes. It beats the ten minute traffic updates, announcements, and lame car commercials on regular radio. They have independent stations in addition to regular stuff and have three great comedy stations. All the stations are also uncensored for those of you who like that sort of thing. Considering many of you don't hesitate to drop hundreds of dollars into computer and stereo equipment, I'm surprised you are complaining. Ten bucks a month is paltry compared to what you get with this. I got the Sony portable and you can listen to it at home after work. It is the best. Bob

Re:XM Radio Rocks!

[MrEfficient]

Why is this comment rated Informative(3)? It reads like a commercial. And this is the only comment this guy has ever posted. It sounds too much like a post from someone who works for XM Radio.

Re:XM Radio Rocks!

[indiigo]

Nope. He's a database programmer.
http://dmoz.org/profiles/rhaasch.html

But his wife leads a fun profession...

Re:XM Radio Rocks!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, the commercial breaks are only 2 minutes long, but how many breaks per hour are there? Inquiring minds want to know.

Re:XM Radio Rocks!

[MtViewGuy]

I can tell very few people here have actually researched the music offerings.

Anyway who's bothered to read the XM Radio website notes that their music selection is nothing short of amazing. XM Radio has music formats that (alas) has been market-reserached out of existance even in large metropolitan markets for terrestrial broadcasters.

Remember the old days when radio stations played oldies, Big Band music, classical music, lots of ethnic music, Easy Listening music, and so on? Today, music on radio is dominated by Adult Contemporary, Heavy Metal, Hip-Hop and Country and Western, with pretty much room for nothing else.

I'm glad XM Radio has arrived. Maybe today's young music listeners will finally discover that massive treasure trove of rock and roll music from the 1960's to middle 1980's that no station wants to play nowadays.

Re:XM radio rocks!

[alexburke]

I've read other gripes of shit audio quality (64-kbps-MP3 quality) on XM. Is this true, or did they have crap receivers/signal strength?

In other words, does it sound lossy or compressed, or is it truly CD quality?

Thanks! :)

Re:XM radio rocks!

[PatJensen]

The signal sounds to my naked (and non-audiophile ear) like a 96K MP3. Almost CD quality. Then again I think it varies based on what you listen to, I don't think the talk and news channels get that much bandwidth.

As far as techno and rock go, it sounds good to me. Much better then FM anyways.

-Pat

Price Difference

[ruvreve]

According to this sony site, the service is only $9.99/month if you activate it online. It is $14.99/month if you call the 800 number and sign up. This sounds like a company that is preparing to offer very little in the way of good customer service. Right from the beginning their business model seems to say "We are going to charge you more if you want to talk to us." Being charged $5/month more to talk to a real person is a little to futuristic to me. My local bank operates the same way which is why I closed my accounts with them.

Why I would consider this

[jfsather]

One would think I could really care less about satellite radio living in a fairly big metro area like Minneapolis/St. Paul. The fact of the matter is that there are basically 2 big companies that own almost all the radio stations here. This means that they get to choose what we get to listen to. They ditched the alternative music radio format for some other crap station. There are three stations that play almost the exact same pop music. I imagine that a lot of large metro areas are like this.

Even worse was living in middle of nowhere Iowa where there was only 1 radio station.

So, it would be nice to have some decent radio stations (i.e. alternative, techno for me). Still, it is pretty hard to sell me on something when I'm only going to be using 2% of it.

MTV

[Sideways The Dog]

Reminds me of when MTV was "all music, all the time". Commercials started to creep in... suddenly it became difficult to tell when the music video stopped and the commericial began. I imagine the same thing will happen to XM.

Re:MTV

[Laplace]

It is easy to tell when MTV is showing a commercial. If MTV is on, then you are watching a commercial.

I'm not interested in Satellite radio

[cr@ckwhore]

I'm not really interested in satellite radio because I'm 99.99% sure I won't find anything I want to listen to. Yeah, this sh*t is nation wide, but who wants that? From my experience, anything nation wide isn't interesting because the presentation is ultra-bland, assumably so nobody is offended. I hear nation wide style broadcasts on my local radio stations mostly on the weekend, which is filler content the station uses to fill the void. "Your listening to the we're going to tell you whats cool this week show, and I'm your host, ultra fake ultra boring radio guy!"

I believe that localized (or regional) traditional FM radio is more interesting to listen to because of its local identity. The DJs are people that are part of the localized culture, we can easily identify with those people, and the presentation is interesting. People identify with their favorite radio stations... its one way we can identify "who we are" in a social context. I certainly would have a hard time identifying with a bland nation-wide pop-culture type of satellite radio "station".

XM and Sirius: Just don't suck, or you die.

[dheeraj]

The biggest problem with radio in America today is that it unabashedly and shamelessly SUCKS. Once the FCC bent over to NAB (National Assocation of Broadcasters) lobbying in the late 90s, and lifted ownership restrictions (which only allowed a company to own one FM and one AM in a market), the way was clear for Clear Channel, Infinity/CBS, and the one or two other conglomerates to move in and utterly destroy radio in this country.

This is why you can turn on the radio in LA on a Sunday night and hear the same idiot DJ on three stations at once, even though his show only loosely fits the format of two of those three -- because Clear Channel would rather pay only one DJ than three. Or why you have stupid radio contests where you now compete against callers across the entire country instead of in your own market. Or why 20-30 stations in a region have not only the same format, but the EXACT SAME playlist every week.

Throw in the thinly veiled payola that is the current record promotion business, and you end up with a very smoothly running machine that operates only for itself and the interests of its owners -- listeners and music enthusiasts be damned. If you're an artist that doesn't have a big label behind you that believes you'd be profitable to them (because there are artists on big labels who get no support from their label -- who might as well just be on a no-name independent label in Des Moines), you're screwed. You may get college radio play, but that's not going to take you very far.

I read recently that Clear Channel is one of the partners of one of these companies -- not sure whether it's XM or Sirius. If this is really the case, this shit is doomed. I have a hard time believing the public is going to PAY for the same bland, homogenized garbage that they already get for free in the 90-something percent of America that is covered by a Clear Channel station already.

Having been a college and community radio DJ in the past, and remembering the days when a fair amount of commercial stations were even pretty good at times, this is really depressing to me. The idea that a wonderful new technology will probably end up being manipulated by the same uncultured, money-obsessed marketroids and milked for every last penny it can spit out, until it ultimately dies, is just plain sad.

So, you want to survive, Sirius and XM? Don't suck.

Digital AM radio

[Anonymous Coward]

I can hardly wait.

OT: $17 per CD

[Ardax]

A lot of people seem to be pissed about the price of CDs. I can't blame them, CDs were supposed to be cheaper, and their price was supposed to go down as more people hopped on the bandwagon. Watch DVDs do the same thing.

Truth be told, I wouldn't mind giving an artist $20 for a CD. The problem is that the artists see very little of that $17, or $14, or $20 that we fork over at the register. THAT pisses me off, and slows my CD buying habit.

Re:OT: $17 per CD

[Hoi Polloi]

I'd go one step further and only pay for the songs I like. At $20+ for a CD of mostly filler I know I'm paying for countless expense accounts and executive bonuses, not the artists. I've become VERY picky about what cds I buy nowadays. It disgusts me to know I'm paying $20+ for a CD that prob costs $5 to make and support the artists themselves. Everytime the RCAA whines about file sharing it rings hollow as I think of how they turn around and screw the artists and the paying consumers. Its time to get rid of these middlemen.

I'm surprised the record industry hasn't tried to ban used CD sales.

Re:OT: $17 per CD

[Ardax]

Yeah, paying only for songs you like would be nice too. I wouldn't mind paying $1-2 for a song. Let me download it in an uncompressed or losslessly compressed format, and I'd be a super happy camper.

But we have to take baby steps. :-)

By the by, I think that they DID try to bad used CD sales. At least, they tried to make it very uncomfortable to do so.

Remedial Math

[rjs0977]

your numbers are wrong.

10E9 / 120 = 8.3 million.

the us population is currently 285.7 million according to the Census Department.

this is a market penetration of 2.9 percent, not thirty.

So how do they enforce subscriptions?

[taliver]

If I "clone" some one else's activation sequence, then only one of us would need to pay the subscription, right? Are they sending down commands that knock out recievers? Can I make a device to mimic those signals?

Someone is going to have to explain how you validate that a system should be receiving a signal if there is absolutely no landline connection. Or will this turn into the same problem that DirectTV has?

Forgot One -- Clear Channel

[andyf]

Broadcast stations are getting bought up left and right, largely by beheamoths like Clear Channel and Capital Cities/ABC (Disney). In the markets I live in, Minneapolis (school year), and Grand Forks (summer), the airwaves are dominated by CRAP, a large portion of which is broadcast by a Clear Channel station (5 in Grand Forks, 7 in Minneapolis). The music choice on these stations seems to be limited to oldies, Britney Spears, and Limp Bizkit. The only alternatives in either market are college radio -- REV 105 used to be a real choice in Minneapolis, but that has been long swallowed up by Disney.

So I'm happy just to see satellite radio for the opportunity for something that's just a little different (granted, there will be Clear Channel and Disney stations on there too).

So maybe we need to start a "pirate radio" station for satellite, or at least get a good net-only station onto satellite.

Re:Forgot One -- Clear Channel

[Anonymous Coward]

How ironic; the channel that once played some punk now plays disco.

Why all /.ers should NOT buy satellite radio

[uslinux.net]

I used to run a college radio station a few years ago, just outside Baltimore, MD. We tried for years to get an AM or FM license so we could broadcast off campus. Nothing big - 5 watts would've been more than enough. All we really wanted was to broadcast a few miles to cover the campus and surrounding apartments. Long story short - we couldn't get a station because the FCC won't license micro stations (stations under 100 watts).

The FCC a few years back decided to allow micropower stations. Congress, backed by the NAB (National Association of Broadcaster), passed legislation overriding the FCC. Essentially, Congress decided that the FCC - the US government entity in charge of communications - was not actually in charge. That legislation just about killed any chance of any real competition.

The truth is that the NAB is a cartel, just like OPEC. Unless you buy an existing station, in any suburban or metro area, you CANNOT get a frequency. The NAB has spectrum, and won't let anyone else get spectrum. They employ any means they can. They fought low power FM and won because they didn't want to lose listeners, didn't want advertisers getting cheaper advertising on small, low budget stations, and wanted to maintain their monopoly.

Why am I irritated, and why should you be too? Well, there are only a few major companies which own most of the radio stations you hear. That classic rock station you like? Owned by Infinity Broadcasting - CBS. That hip hop station? ABC. They playlists you hear are put together by the corporations. The 1996 Telecom act allows a company to own up to 33% of the stations in a market (up from 25% prior). That means, theoretically, 3 companies can own all the AM/FM spectrum in the US. It also means that if those 3 companies don't like something, you may never hear it. XM/Sirius radio means there are only 2 players. If only one survives, there will be only 1 company deciding the music and playlists you listen to. Do you like "Noise in the Basement" - those late night local music shows on your local rock station? You'll never experience anything like that again.

Commercial radio has become just that - commercial. Generic, regurgitated, formulaic "music". Rock was great in the 50's and 60's. The Beatles were pop music. POP MUSIC! Think about today's pop music and you fully understand what I'm saying. Incidentally, my music colletion spans 1920 to the present, 150 CDs, 160 albums, and about 20 gigs of MP3s.

I personally wouldn't use satellite radio if the equipment and service was FREE and there weren't any commercials, simply because I hate knowing one company decides the musical tastes of the entire country. Think about it in different terms if you prefer - Don't like Microsoft, but use their software at home or work because you don't have a choice (incompatibility/available applications/etc)? Think this will be any different with only one company controlling the spectrum on your equipment?

Re:Why all /.ers should NOT buy satellite radio

[mother_superius]

Rock was great in the 50's and 60's.

I'll give you that; but don't give up on general modern music. There are tons of great bands out there (although they certainly don't get coverage like the Beatles): Rancid (rancidrancid.com), Dropkick Murphys (dropkickmurphys.com), Dillinger Four (angelfire.com/mn/dillingerfour, Fugazi (http://www.dischord.com/bands/fugazi.shtml), The Unseen (unseen.unixpunx.net), Thug Murder (http://www.punkfreak.com/thugmurder/), Against All Authority (http://www.aaaonline.org/), etc. OK, sorry, those are all punk rock, but its just an example that music isn't dead.

I've got it! TiVo for car radio!

[affegott]

Wouldn't that be neat. Since it is already digital from the sat, no need to redigitize it...

You could fast forward commericials (assuming you have a buffer...) and pause a good song when you get out to pump gas.

Might be a bit dangerous to use while driving. :-)

Later,
Affe

Local advertising?

[cr@ckwhore]

What does this mean for local advertising that dominates traditional FM radio? Lets say "Larry's Local Lobster Shack" advertises on the radio and generates a lot of business. There really isn't anything attractive about satellite radio advertising for local business owners to get excited about. Plus, its probably a lot more expensive to match the likes of the larger national companies.

I'm sure FM radio isn't going anyway, but will FM become to XM what AM is to FM?

Re:Local advertising?

[EvlG]

I'm sure FM radio isn't going anyway, but will FM become to XM what AM is to FM?

Funny you put it that way, because that is EXACTLY what the advertising campaign for XM said a few months ago when they launched in Dallas.

So could I get both?

[Leebert]

I love to listen to C-SPAN and NPR.

XM has C-SPAN.

Sirius has NPR.

Neither has both.

And I'm sure that's just the beginning.

So would I have to get both to get the content I want? Is it even possible to use one receiver for both? If not, then what if a third network starts up with content I want, instead? A fourth? A fifth?

Re:So could I get both?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sirius carries Cspan and NPR

Yeah

[wiredog]

to *PAY* $10 a month for more commercials

That's why cable TV is such a big failure. Because we have to pay extra AND still see commercials.

Re:Yeah

[ZxCv]

Failure?

Are you living in some alternate dimension? Everyone and their mother has cable or satellite TV, both of which fit your bill for being a failure. The only people that don't have either one are either a)not into TV period or b)unable to afford it.

Re:Yeah

[wiredog]

Any questions?

Re:Yeah

[ryanwright]

He was being sarcastic.

Fucking 20 second lameness filter. Just because Taco only types 10 words per minute doesn't mean the rest of us do.

Re:Yeah

[joekool]

go back, think about that one again

now, remember what words like ironic, or sarcastic, mean.

Thanks!

U.S. Blues

[Anonymous Coward]

Clear channel communications owns near every channel now cowboy. They stream trash and prerecorded DJs. Got Bob n' Tom in the mornings? Think I'm gonna pay for radio?, no way. Let the rich brats squander the money greenspan printed for mommy and daddy on this cr*p. If I cant pluck it freely off the air waves, I think i'll read a book. In the car? Play your MP3s.. to hell with these jokers.

Re:U.S. Blues

[tbone1]

I've listened to Bob and Tom for years. If you think they are bad, try listening to morning shows in other cities. They are unlistenable. No wonder some people think even Howard Stern is good.

Besides, look me in the eye and tell me that a superhero called "Shirtless Girl" is not bordering on genius.

What is the point?

[AlgUSF]

I live in St. Petersburg, FL (Tampa Bay Area). Every genre of music is already covered. Why drop $8-13/mo. to listen to something that I already get for free. I think this would be useful if I lived in a rural area, where you only get like 5 stations, but pointless for everywhere else.

I want this to work...

[ellem]

So I can hear Howard Stern all friggin' day long. I want the All Howard, All Day Station.

I want 3 or 4 sub stations to go with that:

The AHAD Farts
The AHAD Lesbians
The AHAD Interviews
The AHAD Employee Abuses

I'll buy one right now.

Re:I want this to work...

[Anonymous Coward]

Moderators... this is totally on topic. Either you don't know who HS is or you're just friggin' dumb.

Re:NPR without pledge drives

[fredz]

That is something I would be willing to pay for!!

Costs money? Forget it!

[Geopoliticus]

// Begin Rant...

I think I like the concept, but I won't pay for it! I spend most of my time traveling on a train. I'm in one of those "urban" areas (Chicago) that was talked about. I don't have any confidence that this product will serve me well in any of these areas. Cellular phones constantly drop off and my radio stations drop off in this area under bridges, under ground, etc. If I'm paying for this service, I want it ALWAYS on and ALWAYS available. Otherwise what's the point. The article presented the viewpoint that this is allot like cable TV, only Cable TV comes in clear almost all of the time! I rarely have to worry about interference. Besides when I'm at home I go to live365.com and listen for free! Yea, I have to put up with pesky adds, but at least I don't have to pay for these adds. Now, lets say that this was always available and had a bazillion channels. How long with just a subscription based model will you be able to make those record profits your investors are expecting... not long. Unless of course you up the subscription costs or... sell more adds. Forget it. I don't ever think something like this will fly with me. I would better the FCC put up these satellites and used our tax dollars to do this and sold access to these to the different radio stations to put op there content. I don't know. I'm just sick of paying for hyped technology that fails to deliver on it's promises...

// End rant

I might care

[gmack]

WHen I'm behind the wheel I want to be paying attention to the road .. not swapping cds or finding some station that doesn't totally suck.

Mp3? fine.. but now I have to keep that content updated. I'm essentially very lazy.

Radio could offer so much more then it does mindlessly jabbering in the mornings.. the same song sover and over until I'm sick of them, music styles I hate etc

This has the potential to be a better idea but only if it's done right.

What satellite radio needs...

[InterruptDescriptorT]

...to make it a bona fide hit is not all the different genres of music and talk on all those channels, but they need to include the signals of international radio broadcasters like CBC, BBC World Service, Deutsche Welle, RTE, etc.

Myself, I would be more than happy to pony up $12/mo to hear CBC Radio 1 here in Texas. Simply put, the quality of international broadcasting tends to be far greater than almost anything on my FM dial (except for NPR, which is quite good). I think the satellite radio companies are neglecting the huge expatriate audience their service would find here. This could be a good thing for the satellite radio companies, who would pull in more listeners, and some of the money could return to the broadcasters to augment their services and schedules.

Re:What satellite radio needs...

[uncadonna]

Why the CBC continues to be unavailable as broadcast in the US continues to baffle me.

It would take a while for the CBC's better offerings to catch on (their worst offerings being so mind-bogglingly bad wouldn't help) but the potential audience would be multiplied tenfold.

When I need a fix of old Montreal, though, there's always streaming audio at cbc.ca .

Re:What satellite radio needs...

[BluedemonX]

Because it sucks. If you want to listen to a bunch of documentaries on res angst in Moose Jaw, or listen to the favorite but unlistenable bits of modern Jazz that the rush-hour DJ loves to play, knock yourself out. But some of us are interested in things other than a bunch of elite-eastern Canadian liberals back-slapping each other.

Todradio. All edge, all the time. Give me a break. That beaverish little kid couldn't hold an edge if you put him in a skate sharpener.

Re:What satellite radio needs...

[InterruptDescriptorT]

I hear you loud and clear. CBL (Radio 1 on 740kHz out of Toronto) used to make it down as far south, and reguarly, as Indianapolis and Cincinnati, broadcasting at 50kW. Now that it's on FM, both countries lose: the FM signal is almost inaudible outside of the 416, and it's not even in stereo, and it's inaccessible in the US.

Definitely good broadcasting though--I find myself craving As It Happens, The Muckracker, Madly Off In All Directions and most other Radio 1 programs all the time. Thank God for the streaming audio.

Why I want Satelite Radio. Why I won't buy it.

[mjh]

I don't want satelite radio for music. I have mp3.

I want satelite radio for sports. I like sports. Especially the Green Bay Packers. I live in Charlotte, NC. It's awfully difficult to listen to the packers in NC, unless of course they happen to be playing in NC, and then I just go the game. About the only thing that satelite radio provides me that I want is access to my favorite sports broadcasts no matter where I am in the country. That is, by far, the biggest selling point to me.

But I'm not going to get it. I am just not going to pay anything per month for this. There is no way that they're going to remove commercials from sports broadcasts. So I'm going to be paying someone to advertise to me? I think not. But even more important than that is the idea of the incremental infrastructure costs.

The reason that I pay for cable service to my house is because it actually costs the cable company extra money to run the cable to my house, and to continually maintain it. I pay for internet service because in order for me to get that service, I have to pay the additional infrastructure that allows me to connect to it (modems, bandwidth). So the more subscribers that a cable company or an ISP has, the more infrastructure that company requires. Thus there is an incremental cost associated with each additional customer that they have.

But this is not the case for broadcast providers. If 10 people listen to a broadcast or 1000 people listen to a broadcast, it costs the same amount for the broadcaster. Basic calculus: as the number of listeners approaches infinity, the cost per listener approaches 0. (Yes, yes, I know the number of listeners is finite.) Or put another way the incremental cost per listener is nothing.

So with no incremental cost per listener, the value of the service comes from getting lots and lots of listeners. In the cable and ISP world, lots of subscribers are good, but they also impose an additional cost per subscriber. But in the broadcast world, once you've put up the basic infrastructure, you want as many people to get that service as possible. Your costs are finished, so remove as many barriers as possible. Why? So that you can then turn around and tell advertisers that they can reach 275 million people (i.e. the entire US) with your service. If you put up barriers to entry for your listeners, you weaken the value of your advertising real estate. Why do the TV networks love the superbowl so much? Because 1 billion viewers is *very* expensive advertising real estate. TV networks make a killing on the superbowl. Advertising real estate is seriously valuable stuff.

Satelite radio and TV have such an oppurtunity to have the highest priced advertising space in the world. But they're squandering that oppurtunity by charging listeners/veiwers for their service. And why do they do that? Because their investors are simply not patient enough to be able to wait for returns on their investment. The cost of putting up satelites for these services is very high. But even so, it's a fixed, one time cost. What you want is to put that against ongoing, and increasing income. One strategy is to charge $x per month to the listeners. But this is short sighted. It does provide ongoing income, but it's hard to increase it without losing sources of that income (i.e. every time you increase the cost, you lose some customers).

The other option is to give the service away to listeners/viewers, and then charge advertisers for access. As the numbers of listeners/viewers increases, your advertising rates can also increase. So fixed cost, balanced by ongoing, and increasing income.

The problem, of course, is that the investors can't wait long enough for the satelite companies to build up their viewers. They want their returns and they want them as soon as possible. What they fail to see is that the demand for that immediate return is resulting in building businesses for which people will not subscribe. And, as a previous poster mentioned, when these companies fail, they certainly won't say it's because we had a bad plan.

Too bad. It's a good idea, ruined by impatience.

not a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

It won't be a problem. S band doesn't suffer from rain fade nearly as badly as Ku band (dish network) etc.

As long as....

[x0]

Clear Channel Communications has nothing to do with any of the programming choices.

In the last three years I have moved from North Carolina to Texas, California, and finally Minnesota.

CCC has done more to ruin Classic Rock stations (shock jocks, et al...), that I would consider $10/mo cheap if the playlists are good.

Re:As long as....

[Hidyman]

I whole heartedly agree.
Clear Channel Communications is ruining the air waves with crap.
I may go and buy one just to stick it to them.

Clear Channel has partial ownership in XM

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.xmradio.com/newsroom/screen/press_relea se_1999_06_08.html

Re:Clear Channel has partial ownership in XM

[McD!ck]

Guess I will have to wait till the day that they can put shoutcast directly into my car! DAMN IT!

Thank god they are keeping advertisers out

[pyite69]

I hope XM fails and Sirius succeeds for the basic reason
of being commercial-free.

Consolidation and advertisers are the big problems with FM
radio these days. There are many people willing to spend
$10 a month to not have advertising.

I wish it were possible to tune out the commercials on regular
cable and the networks. I'd pay $20 a month for this.
Obviously this wouldn't be possible for live events, but
I can live with that.

Stop buying into the corp owned culture constantly

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe this monthly shakedown will force more and more people to turn off the corporate owned culture (movies, tv, radio, etc). These companies can only pick at my wallet so many times before it comes up empty and then tough luck to them!

I don't want to spend more on premium cable channels because I'd rather have less desire to sit in front of the idiot box, not more. Don't tell me that with 100+ radio channels they'll have 100+ quality broadcasts, it'll be 10 (at best) with the rest all crap, just like TV. I'd rather turn the radio off and roll down the window or play a cd of my choice. God forbid someone should have to listen to a different local radio station on a long drive.

Net-based Streaming Preview?

[muchawi]

If the monthly subscription cost is really about supporting the infrastructure, not the content, it would be nice to "test-drive" the content over the net before forking over $300 for a receiver.

That way XM||Sirius could attract viewers based on their supposedly superior content, and users could know what they are getting into.

Re:Net-based Streaming Preview?

[Anonymous Coward]

well, they offer 4 hour samples of their program.
Pre-produced, though. My company is hosting the streams ;)
Go check out www.xmradio.com

Re:Net-based Streaming Preview?

[Alex Kalita]

The XM radio site has samples of most of their channels. (requires Windows Media Player I believe). I have been listening to the classical music channels this afternoon, and I have been very pleased with their selection. I would easily pay $10 a month for this. I'm still trying to justify to myself paying $300 for the receiver though. It sure beats FM radio hands down (0 classical channels in my area!)

What's going to be the point?

[BluedemonX]

100 channels of N'Britney Boys? Or one stream of pap, a stream of reggae, a stream of Goth, one of Industrial, another for 80s new wave, the Disco channel, the Gangsta Rap channel, etc?

What'd make this TRULY cool is to allocate 1/10 of same streams to the best of public access.

Monopoly is not a free press or competition

[isdnip]

Sure, the technology's cool. But the way Uncle (Frank Charlie) Charlie licensed it is indicative of everything that's wrong with modern American media.

With broadcast radio, in urban areas at least, there used to be a lot of broadcasters. Now they're allowed to consolidate so Clear Channel and Viacom own most of the stations. College radio and a handful of local holdouts are what remains of diversity.

With satellite radio, they cut right to the chase. Two licenses, nationwide, high capital corporate players. No other diversity. Sure, those players can select their providers from a diverse supply, if they so choose. But only if the dollars say so. No equivalent of Cable Leased Access, which theoretically allows anybody to buy a slot on a cable network, or for that matter cable's Public Access. Just 100 channels of what your Providers wants. Big Brother Knows Best. In the olden days, if there were a "natural monopoly" of this sort (if, for techical reasons, there could only be one or two providers, each with many channels, which seems to be the case here), then there might be the common carrier obligation or more open third-party-programming rules. But that's not what the content monopolists want.

Worse, the two systems are not interoperable. So you can't even pick one. You get either Sirius or XM, depending on which car (or aftermarket radio) you buy. So the duopoly is really a monopoly so far as listeners are concerned -- at least with broadcast radio, you get your choice of Viacom or Clear Channel pablum. And that interesting stuff down at the low end of the dial.

This is the DMCA's companion, a broadcast model from hell.

wrong

[pyite69]

I have used an in-car mp3 player for several years now,
and I would enjoy having a source of interesting new music,
as long as it is commercial-free.

This simply was not possible with broadcast stations because
the formats were driven by labels, not by people interested
in music for music's sake. And of course you know how bad
the commercials are.

I wish it were possible to get something like this for TV.
The only problem is those exclusive deals made by the
TV shows. What I wouldn't give for a commercial free
version of comedy central.

I've got one.

[toastyman]

I've got one now, and have noticed a few things.

1) The sound quality isn't quite what I thought it would be. While I don't know the actual bitrates used, the music channels sound about like a 64k MP3, and the talk/news channels sound about like a 24k MP3. I think I'd rather slightly fewer channels if it meant better quality.

2) Since they transmit every bit multiple times, (either 3 or 4 copies of the stream is sent at once on a time delay, I can't remember which), dropouts are EXTREMELY rare. They have both spatial (two satellites you can receive at once), frequency (broadcasting on multiple frequencies), and time (broadcasting the same content multiple times) diversity. Nice.

3) Yes, you're paying $9.95/month for *SOME* channels that have commercials. Most channels don't have commercials. Even then, the stations that DO have commercials air far far less than the FM stations I've listened to.

4) You get some neat features like being able to display artist/song for each channel.

5) Wow, some of the channels air things you'd never hear on the radio. The main comedy channel has more swear words per minute than you could imagine. None of the songs have the "bad words" beeped out. If you have kids, and are concerned, you can have them block any channels you don't want them to listen to. (Each channel is pretty clearly marked on the guide if it has strong language or not)

6) Some of the channels do sound kinda amateur-hour. Kinda like college radio. I'm sure as time progresses they'll get more refined, but... Wow, some of the DJ's and commercials for themselves are cheesy. Really bad.

7) They do have some really cool channels. CNN Headline News (the audio from the TV channel - usually works well except for "Nothing can describe the images you're seeing now..." bits), The Discovery Channel Radio, etc... Keeps me entertained.

8) If you're a channel flipper, the delay between changing channels is kinda long... 1/2 to 1 second.

9) Overall worth it for me. The total of 1 to 1.5 hours a day I spend in the car is at least enjoyable now. I've only had it for 3-4 weeks, but it's kept my attention that long.

I disagree

[pyite69]

If the channels are good enough, I will gladly add this in
addition to my mp3 player.

The key, obviously, is programming. I have been radio-free
for years and sometimes I just wish someone would choose
good music for me... but every time I listen to the radio I
realize how unlikely it is because you are not the customer;
you are the product.

With these guys, you are the customer, so I think they are
more likely to come up with good programming.

how long

[Suppafly]

How long until someone reverse engineers these receivers to play for free. Seems like it would be easy enough. There are ways to hack home television satellite dishes to play free movie channels and such, and they are connected to a phone line. You'd think it would be fairly simple to bypass any authenification system in a car unit so that you could make it receive service for free.

Please tell me where

[DAldredge]

Please tell me where I can download the mp3 versions of TOMMOROWS news? A lot of people enjoy listing to current news/talk and that is rather hard to do using mp3s.

The XM-Cable parallel

[Goose3254]

That's a valid comparison. XM is higher quality sound with more options. Cable is of higher quality than broadcast TV and usually provides more options than broadcast. Commercial free costs extra, a la HBO.I for one probably won't partake as I listen to news/sports/talk radio and good old-fashioned CDs, content controlled by your's truly. I think the cost is a bit on the high side however, considering the packaging the cable companies are putting out now (101 channels, including 2 premium movie channels for $13.95!!! or whatever). Recorded music ceased to be any sort of major impact in my life after the recording borg decided in it's infinite wisdom to eliminate the single best marketing tool ever...Napster. The only good I see here is that maybe this will force the FCC off it's dead @$$ and make those puritans see that maybe we should really believe in the 1st Amendment and that it applies to broadcast medium too!

A wish list

[interstellar_donkey]

Here's what I'd like to see:

In these satellite radios, put in a 802.11b wireless network card and a decent sized hard drive.

Allow me to download mp3s from my computer directly into the car. (This is what I'd like to see even if I didn't have the sat radio).

Allow me to stream the service into my house via the network from my car outside. Now I don't have to buy a second receiver/subscription.

Allow the receiver to constantly record the music ala Tivo, so if I'm driving down the road I just push 'save' on the deck and when I get home, the song instantly uploads to my computer in mp3 format.

The technology is there; it really wouldn't be that hard to do, though it might end up draining your car battery depending on how much power it uses. Of course, the powers that be would never allow this (or would they, considering it's a subscription?)

Once again, Europe does it differently

[wackybrit]

In the UK we've had digital radio for some time. However, as always, we have to take a different route to the US (think cellphones or TV here) and our digital radio is terrestrial.

There's no subscription fee, and anyone with a digital radio can pick it up, but there are a few things to consider...

1. Poor station choice. In London you can pick up probably about thirty channels, which is more than normal but hardly amazing. Go 150 miles north of London and you're nearly slumming it.. all you can get is the BBC Radio 1 through 5. Crap.
2. Questionable quality on certain channels. Digital radio, just like digital TV, should offer enhanced quality. However, they're pulling the same tricks as the digital TV companies by running at as low a bitrate as possible. Do we really want 96kbps mp3 quality?
3. Low Infrastructure Costs. This is a good one, and means we don't have to pay $X.XX per month to listen in.
4. VERY EXPENSIVE RADIO SETS. Digital radio sets in the UK right now are very highly priced. The 'cheap' ones are about $300 US, and you can pay far more for one for in your car.

As you can imagine, digital radio has NOT taken off in the UK because of some of these problems. The big problem is that it costs too much for a radio set.

Hopefully a satellite based service will be launched in Europe. Even for $10 a month I'd sign up for a commercial-free service.. I could rip all the songs to mp3!

A digital satellite radio service already exists but it was primarily designed for use in Africa, and as such.. has hundreds of really really really crappy channels from Turkey and the Sudan. No thanks. And you have to point the stupid aerial at the satellite at all times, which rules out mobile or in-home use.

Re:Once again, Europe does it differently

[Anonymous Coward]

1. I'm not in London and can recieve 5 DAB multiplexes, with a total of 39 stations excluding the test broadcasts, which is certainly more than FM & AM stations, which total around 20 at most. There are two national networks on a Single Frequency Network, one is the BBC and DigitalOne a commercial provider, these can be found everywhere, which is 60% of the country at the moment (85% soon).

2. It's MPEG1 Layer II, BBC 1-4 are 192kbps which sound great, certainly an improvement on FM, the mono stations are around 96kbps such as Five-Live, this is certainly and improvement on MW/LW. Remember XM Radio is using 64kbps for stereo music stations, mono speech stations are below that.

I have to agree that the quality of digital terrestrial TV is quite poor on some multiplexes, the BBC and Channel4 one is quite good but some of the pay ones are strikingly poor, the film ones are very good though. It's worth noting the Radio Authority set minimum datarates for DAB stations, you will not find a stereo music station below 128kbps, doesn't sound like much it's certainly better than FM.

3. Yeah, the digital transmitters are only a few KW, many times lower than anologue and the COFDM encoding is very robust, considering you can get a whole multiplex on 1.5mhz of bandwidth it's very spectrum efficient, and even more so if you're using a Single Frequency Network, where the same frequency is used right across the country.

4. The costs of the sets have been a sticking point, but TI release a cheap single chip implementation a few months ago, have faith in moore's law. You can get a reciever for your PC for £49 now, this has the bonus of being able to save the baseband MP2 transport stream, and also transcodes to MP3, you can also listen/record any number of stations in the same multiplex simultaneously.

WorldSpace is a nice system but I have to agree the content isn't all that great since the transponder is actually aimed at Africa. There's loads of stations on the Astra satellites, but of cource it's not mobile.

Have faith in DAB :)

Re:Once again, Europe does it differently

[Anonymous Coward]

There's 7 million homes in the UK with DigitalTV, which is around 30% of the homes in the country, the highest figure in the world.

Digital Radio will follow soon when it makes its way into the mainstream systems.

My solution to Never-Ending Music...

[doppleganger871]

1. Broadband, Agent, Newsgroups.
2. CD-Burner
3. Blank CD's.
4. JVC KD SH-99 MP3 Head-Unit.
5. 12-Disc Changer, For my Audio CD's.
6. 1000 Watts of power so everyone can hear it :)

Simple enough.

dumbass, read the article

[pyite69]

> I will not pay $10 a month for the 'right' to listen to more
> commercials

Sirius is commercial free, at least for the music channels.
I guess the talk radio guys will need a break now and then.

Re:dumbass, read the article

[reaper20]

I did, you apparently didn't read my comment, see my subject, I will not pay for _XM_.

After bankruptcy - the Iridium model ?

[pspinler]

Don't loose hope, if XM and Sirius services fail, I can see someone pulling an Iridium manuver out of bankruptcy procedings.

(e.g. buying their satellites and frequencies at a vastly reduced cost, and offering a much much cheaper service)

-- Pat

Feds will subpoena Cmdr Taco for your IP address

[Anonymous Coward]

Look for XM Radio & the Feds to issue a subpoena to Slashdot for your IP address. They will then issue a subpoena to your ISP to discover who it was that was using that IP address on December 12, 2001. When they get your name, they will drag you down to FBI headquarters and keep you there until you reveal your friend's identity. Good luck.

PS: Your friend is a felon, or about to become one.

Only one way

[Apreche]

There is only one way this is going to work. Nix the subscription costs. Make it a standard in all new home stereo systems and car stereos. Make sure to broadcast all normal radio stations over it as well. Nobody is going to pay extra money to listen to the radio in their car, something which is free. And they're especially not going to if they don't get Don Imus, Howard Stern, and other popular radio programs. People also aren't going to go out and buy a new car stereo to switch. They're must be no effort involved. There also needs to be a standard. People will wait until one of these companies wins over the other one before they buy in.

Re:I WILL pay for XM.

[zeda]

Oh please. Not the "mp3 sounds bad," arguement.
Either shut up and buy your gold speaker cables or learn how to encode mp3s with quality.

XM Unsigned

[charlesc]

One of the XM stations is XM unsigned - a station that plays nothing but unsigned indie artists. Every so often they give you info on the bands, including website info and how you can order their CDs.

People in these threads have been asking why they should pay for XM when they get what they need from FM or MP3s for nothing. For me, the answer lies in XM Unsigned - it gives me the opportunity to discover new bands and find out how to support them directly. You hear things you would never have heard otherwise, and you give the RIAA the end around and don't support their overpriced crippled soundalike tripe discs, opting instead to buy CDs directly from indie talent YOU like. This, to me, is worth the $10 a month even if I didn't get ANY other stations.

Re:Feds will subpoena Cmdr Taco for your IP addres

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless he's smart enough to use anonymizer.com. They don't keep records of IPs.

Do you listen to classical music?

[Anonymous Coward]

My experience has been that techno-pop/rock/dance music sounds fine in the compressed formats (MP3, Real Audio streaming, Windows Media streaming), but if you take something like Bruckner or Mahler or Beethoven, and run it through your stereo system, it sounds like cats clawing a chalkboard.

OK

[Byteme]

Sign me up for a Free Jazz and an Elephant6 channel.

I really don't see it happening. If they are out to make money, they are only going to program music that has an audience of a certain size. They will probably get their playlist from ASCAP or BMI or some charts.

Re:OK

[micromoog]

Those are labels, not genres. Let me know about the all-Elephant6-all-the-time college radio station when you find it.

When you want to hear something specific, you listen to recorded music. When you want to hear a variety of the kind of music you like, you listen to the radio.

However, if you're the kind of person who avoids well-known things just to be mysterious and esoteric, you better stick to your CDs.

Re:OK

[Anonymous Coward]

nope there are independent and local channels on both XM Radio and Sirius.

Re:OK

[Byteme]

Those are labels, not genres.

Good observation. Let me clarify: Free Jazz is not a label... I linked to AUM as an example of who I am talking about as far as artists are concerned in the genre (I could have said Modern Creative). I was half jokingly making a statement about the E6 bands. They are 'indie' for the most part and with the steaming pile of crap that I usually hear on the radio, it pisses me off even more that great artists go unnoticed.

Let me know about the all-Elephant6-all-the-time college radio station when you find it.

The local WAMH of Amherst College has more than one E6 show... My guess would be 2-6 hours a week?

When you want to hear something specific, you listen to recorded music. When you want to hear a variety of the kind of music you like, you listen to the radio.

You obviously have not seen my record collection.

However, if you're the kind of person who avoids well-known things just to be mysterious and esoteric, you better stick to your CDs.

Not me. I have every album-single-EP from Beck, Radiohead, Butthole Surfers, Elliot Smith, Talking Heads to name a few (all attaining pop status as far as I am concerned), and a good amount of 'classic rock', classical and Jazz standards. I just feel that art moves in one direction ---> new while not being derivative. I seem to only find that rarely, and mostly in improvised music.

You got that right

[Anonymous Coward]

"There are no trolls on GiZ."

Actually, there's one called MCA who's doing a pretty good job. And a guy called hairy_potter is starting to come around. But you are right, in general, nobody there deserves the appellation.

Me too,

[Bake]

but then again the stuff I've discovered by listening to the radio was aired on "underground" radio stations and/or shows dedicated to "underground" music. And it's a loooong time since that happened :)

Don't know what XM plays? Hit their website...

[darrick]

This won't tell you about reception, but it will tell you if they have anything that you want to listen to:

http://www.xmradio.com

Click "Programming" at the top of the screen, and then choose away. I personally like channel 51, The XM Music Lab (progressive rock/metal, psychedelic, etc.; a very underrepresented genre, IMO). If I could afford it (I'm being hit by the crappy high-tech economy right now), I would buy it. It's better than all the banal crap that plays here in the Dallas/Ft. Worth, Texas, US, metroplex.

Which codecs are used?

[flowerp]

Who knows about the technical specifications of XM radio?

What modulation scheme is used? What kind of forward error correction and interleaving? How are channels multiplexed? What audio codecs are applied? and at what bitrates?

Can the codec data (or the raw bitstream) be extracted at some pins of the XM decoder chipset?

This would be almost as interesting to hack as the x-box ;)

Christian

Why all /.ers SHOULD buy satellite radio

[RocketScientist]

NAB filed briefs with the FCC attempting to block frequency allocations for both XM and Sirius, citing the same complaints they have whenever someone tries to break their cartel, typically intereference with existing services. It looks like these guys are on our side, not on NAB's side. I agree, NAB sucks ass, and they are a cartel, in some ways worse than OPEC because they fall under US jurisdiction and they still exist. This is another way to beat them,
not join them.

YAMSFIDN

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet Another Monthly Service Fee I Don't Need.

This could open alot of eyes...

[biggleswat]

For people here in the US who do not have a top notch radio station (in Detroit we have WDET) in their area, this could be a Good Thing. After I stopped listening to commercial radio a few years ago, my CD collection has become increasingly more diverse. I'd say that probably 50-60% of my CD purchases in the past few years were directly related to things I heard on WDET; music you would never hear on commercial radio.

I'm hoping that this takes off. Maybe it will serve, (as ESPN once did for sports -- before it became pop culture), as a showcase for the other side of music. There is so much excellent music floating around that many people never get a chance to hear.

Re:This could open alot of eyes...

[Anonymous Coward]

Being in the Southeastern Michigan area and commuting a lot (approx. 10 hours per week), I have to second this: WDET rules (I would have said "WDET rocks", but that could be misunderstood as implying that the station lacks musical diversity :-)

If WDET's signal weren't so strong (clear reception even in Ann Arbor), I'd definitely consider paying a monthly fee for a satellite-radio version of their lineup. But I get the best of both worlds now -- great music and no cost. Who says the only good places to live in the USA are on the coasts?

One questions

[iceT]

What happens when I go under an overpass in my car? Last time I checked, satellite communications were line of site... Is my radio going dropp out ever 1/2 mile as a go up 'sunken' highways with overpasses ever 1/2 mile?

Re:One questions

[Mega_doof]

Apparently it's a buffered stream, so, no it won't.

Re:Why I want Satelite Radio. Why I won't buy it.

[Mistah Blue]

Excellent analysis!

I'll go further and say we, in the US, can see a long term horizon about as far away as our nose. mjh hits on the head about wanting payout now.

This is why I doubt many, if any, of our corporations will be around 200 years from now. There is no long term thinking here... just about the next quarter.

One way to fix this would be to not allow analysts to analyze companies their firms do business with. They would have to sell that analysis to make $$$. Guess what, that will improve the quality of analysis because who in their right mind will pay for shoddy analysis. Blodget, et. al. will have to get off their duffs, learn the industries they are analyzing, and then go out and do their homework.

XM on internet - streaming

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to sample the music, go to www.xm.com. They stream a lot of their channels (32/64 kb, so not great) so you can see if you like their channels.

-Thor

Re:Feds will subpoena Cmdr Taco for your IP addres

[Anonymous Coward]

Except I did the same thing. And I'm posting from a library terminal wearing a moustache and goggles.

Fear not! Just look to Iridium . . .

[davebo]

So - let's say your analysis is spot on. Current business charges subscription, not enough people sign up, company goes bankrupt. Then what happens?

I think exactly what happened with Iridium. The satelites are still in orbit. Somebody will pick them up out of the bankruptcy proceedings for pennies (probably fractions of pennies) on the dollar. This new company will only have ground crew maintenance & programming costs as overhead - not interest payments on the monsterous debt incurred during launch. Suddenly, it's very easy to make money on advertising alone - or at least convince investors that you will be able to do so.

The moneybags behind these first two companies will be screwed (much like Motorola for Iridium) - but the US will have free satelite radio.

Local and XM?

[jeeryg_flashaccess]

One thing that would hook me is if I could get regular AM/FM and XM on the same hardware. Does anybody know if this is possible.

I want to be able to hear 1077 the end, and XM with the touch of a button. Oh and 99.9. That station rocks!

Howard Stern

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoever gets the Howard Stern unedited feed (and fewer commercials???) will win

It's worse than that (He's dead, Jim)

[Watts Martin]

There's a book I recall hearing about called The Age of Access by perennial techno-worrywort Jeremy Rifkin. In it, he postulated that we were moving toward a new phase in capitalism, where the relationship of people to property would shift--essentially, the rental model would become the norm rather than the purchase model. More and more of "your stuff" would really be the company's stuff, with your terms of use dictated by their licenses.

And when you think about it, the idea really doesn't even require government intervention--in fact, the less government regulation there is, the better it works out for the companies. After all, what they're rewarded for is simply steadily increasing profit. We like to think the free market dictates the way that they'll do that is by offering the best possible service at the best possible price, but other good ways to increase profit involve buying up your existing competitors and increasing barriers of entry to new potential competitors. (If your competitors have enough of the market share and enough "exclusive" deals or single-supplier contracts with your potential customers, you're not going to have the resources to compete if you're a startup.)

So, really, what's wrong with existing revenue models is that they don't offer as much of a chance for "customer lock-in." This is one of those interesting paradoxes about a market: it works really well as long as the playing field is level, but the most successful players will always have as their goal tilting the playing field in their favor--eliminating competition in any way possible.

This is, of course, why games have rules. And it's why markets are regulated. Whoops, we don't like regulated markets anymore, do we?

Hmm.

VHS vs BETA _again_ - does it really matter?

[number_man]

So...Two different comanies with different standards want us to pony up:

$400 for a new satellite receiver

$100 (please verify) for a new satellite antenna (which doesn't come with the receiver)

$10 per month to listen to something you may listen to for 8 hours a day

It doesn't sound like a deal to me...maybe we could make some mp3 discs (shuffled by a program...pre-burn, of course), buy a radio that plays mp3 CDs ($179) and listen to that...

Or better yet, if you know you're going on a trip, search the internet (since we are 'technolgists') and find out what radio stations are along the way...

Seems to me like satellite radio may be an answer to a question nobody asked...

I work in the radio business...

[Newer Guy]

Satellite radio has endless possibilities. Already the customer base exists just in trucks and rentals to make it a success. I look at it this way.... TV is available for free. A certain number of people have antennas and watch free TV. Next there's broadcast basic cable which is cheap (around 10 bucks a month). For this you get perfect local TV and usually a community channel or two. A certain number of people get this. Then there's basic cable, which has satellite channels in addition to over the air and costs 35 bucks or so. A certain number of people sign up for this (this is the most popular cable choice by the way). Then there's basic satellite TV which has no local stations (usually), offset by more satellite networks for generally the same price as basic cable. Some people opt for this option. Next there's Digital cable. THEN there's 1001 pay TV options (HBO, TMC, Showtime, etc.). Finally there's pay per view which offers even more choices. Where am I going with all of this you ask? Simple. The same business model that's been applied to TV can work just as well for radio. XM and Sirus simply are trying it. It'll eventually wind up with just as many choices as one has for TV. For example, though I'd not pay 5 bucks a month to hear an uncensored Howard Strern show, I'll bet that other people happily would. Or some people would happily pay for a station programming music and news from their homeland. Others might be willing to pay for a radio station that plays just heavy metal or beautiful music or classical. Get the picture? (pun intended)

XM is hella sweet

[ResQuad]

Ok, I live up in the lake tahoe area in California/Nevada. AM/FM radio here sucks horibly even the best station with 3 repeaters in the area is constantly staticy or otherwise not working. I found XM radio and got it installed in my truck as soon as I could (since I do a bunch of driving). It wonderful, no static, digital quality music, etc. I really recomend it to anyone in an area that doesnt get very good am/fm radio. Or anywhere for that matter. I have driven from Tahoe to multiple places in california including LA, San Luis Obisbo, San Fransisco, and the radio works perfectly the entire time. The radios buffer a bit of the signal so when you go under an overpass you dont loose you music. And as for mp3 players etc, They doent get you live news, talk radio, the commendy channel (xm150 which is hella ****ing funny), and anything else for that matter. Sometime I just surf the dial to stuff I nirmally don't like and see if there is something there that I might enjoy. Its really great and I hope XM stays around. -JON

Re:Feds will subpoena Cmdr Taco for your IP addres

[Anonymous Coward]

Good 4 ewe.

Seriously though, your "friend" is into some très illegal stuff.

Britney

[tripletwentie]

How many stations do I really want to hear Britney Spears on?

TV used to be free too

[PeterMiller]

I remember growing up, and TV was always free. Only recently (10 years) has using a free antenna on my roof NOT been an option. You want to watch free sponsored programming? Too bad, pay for it.

A friend of mine was the last hold out in the hood back home, and his signal just started getting worse and worse, until one day the cable company came by and suggested he hook up. The family said no, new cables went up across the street and "poof" no more signal.

It will be the same with radio, but over time. Pretty soon there will be no incentive to broadcast over the airwaves anymore, and you will have to pay for the right to listen.

Look, I can understand paying for cable. Dragging lines, hooking up to my house, maintenance of the boxes, ok cost justified. But the local TV station never charged me for putting an antenna on my roof. Of course the simple fact is the only reason they didn't, is they couldn't figure out HOW to charge me, the cable companys did.

The satellite companies are re-broadcasting local and national stations to you for a fee, that's essentially what is going on. Do you need crystal clear quality while listing to a radio call in show, no I think not. So why pay?

Because in 5 years, everyone will have to.

Before you decide....

[Muad'Dave]

that there's nothing for you on XM radio, try their samples. I had the opportunity to see it demo'ed just before their official rollout - it was really nifty. I was able to find technical specs on the fcc website, hidden among various license actions. Here's an excerpt:

XM Radio Inc. has filed an application for modification of its authorization to construct, launch and operate two Digital Audio Radio Service (DARS) satellites. XM Radio seeks (1) to increase the maximum EIRP of each of its DARS satellites to 68.5 dBW, (2) to revise its downlink channelization plan by increasing the number of channels from five to six, including four carrier frequencies (two per satellite) of 1.84 MHz each and two frequencies for terrestrial repeaters of 2.53 MHz each, and (3) to increase the transmission rate of each of its satellite carriers to 3.28 Mbit/s.

Our satellites will transmit audio programming within a 12.5 MHz range of S-Band radio frequencies that have been allocated by the FCC for our exclusive use. Megahertz is a unit of measurement of frequency. This 12.5 MHz bandwidth will be subdivided to carry the transmission of six signals, two signals to be transmitted from each of our two satellites and two signals to be transmitted by the terrestrial repeater network. The audio programming for XM Radio will be carried on two satellite signals, and the remaining two satellite signals and the terrestrial repeater signals will repeat the audio programming to enhance overall signal reception. The transmission of higher quality sound requires the use of more kilobits per second than the transmission of lesser quality sound. In order to provide high-quality digital sound, we expect that music channels will require approximately 56 to 64 kilobits per second, depending on the type of compression technology used, whereas talk channels will require significantly less bandwidth. We expect to use our allocated bandwidth in such a way as to provide up to 100 channels of programming, with our music channels having a high bandwidth allocation so as to provide high-quality digital sound.

We have signed a contract with ST Microelectronics to design and produce chips that will decode the XM Radio signal. We have completed the production chipset design and ST Microelectronics has commenced fabrication to make the components available to radio manufacturers starting the end of March 2001.

Technology will include the use of COFDM (Code Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex), which is a superior modulation technique for the delivery of high quality audio, video and data. This modulation technique allows a moving vehicle to receive quality service at highway speeds.

Re:Before you decide....

[flowerp]

eek, 64 kbit/s per channel.

If they use any other compression but AAC, it will sound plain horrible. And even AAC isnt perfect at that bitrate.
For sure, they don't use WMA ;)
So the modulation scheme is COFDM. That answers one of my (many) questions.

Re:Before you decide....

[Muad'Dave]

What I got from it was that they average out to 64Kbit/s per channel. They said that the music channels would get more, the talk channels less. It could be that the max per channel was 64Kbit - even so, it sounded very good when I checked it out. I listened to the classical station (which usually provides the greatest dynamic range), and it sounded pretty doggone good.

If you add up all the bandwidths of their signals, they sure are using that 12.5 MHz slice efficiently! They must have some wicked filters!

It's DIGITAL right???

[Anonymous Coward]

I just wanna know when someone figures out how to rip mp3's from this bad boy. That'll put a dent in CD sales (esp. ones with copy/rip "protection").

AC

MCA? A Troll?

[Whom The Bell Trolls]

You keep on believing that. There is nothing troll-worthy there.

I have some respect for hp, so will leave him alone. I think he smelled blood and jumped on the bandwagon.

I sure hope he does not find MCA interesting.

PUT IN RENTAL CARS

[just someone]

If you want an audience to buy them
pony up some more cash, and put them in rental cars, take out the CD players. Don't charge the rental companies anything, except for advertising air time.

Driving accross the country, rent one of our cars, and you will never be without music.

Re:Why I want Satelite Radio. Why I won't buy it.

[Phisch2]

So with this economic analysis in mind, exactly how much does the price of putting up a satellite have to drop before a company will start broadcasting radio channels for free. And even more importantly, when will a company like DirectTV start broadcasting their commercial channels for free. Wouldn't a regular cable channel like comedy central be willing to take some of their revenue from commercials and pay a satellite company to broadcast their signal nation wide for free. If they did this, wouldn't their user base would sky rocket enough to cover the cost

pay for ads???

[nate1138]

let me get this straight, I pay 9.99 a month to get (some) channels with ads, and all of that quality music the RIAA wants me to hear?? Wow, what a fucking deal. I think I'll pass, and spend the savings on an in-dash cd-mp3 player.

Need pay per dayoption

[Ulfius]

What they need to do is get it added to all car stereos for no additional cost, then have a pay-per-day/week option. If I were taking a trip, I could call an activation number on my cell phone and have the receiver activated for the duration of my trip. The cost would be added to my phone bill. Maybe $1 per day or $5 per week.

This would also be nice if I got tired of the cd's in my car and nothing good was on the standard radio, I could call and activate it immediately.

Excellent Point!

[cryptochrome]

Excellent Point! You put it quite clearly, although you wrote too much. However, your argument does fail for channels that don't do advertising, i.e. HBO and the sirius network. And you also didn't mention that satellite broadcasting is far more efficient than cable or broadcast for every type of content except local news and entertainment.

So let me propose a hybrid approach - satellites distribute advertising supported channels for free (users pay only the cost for recievers, which could be subsidized, and they do need to improve their reliability). Using the existing subscription-verification methods they have in place, they charge extra for the premium channels. Local broadcasters and cable companies either go out of business, change their business model, or operate with the satellite providers for local content (news, entertainment, and particularly advertising inserted into the other channels), broadband internet (particularly upstream, since satellite can handle downstream), and on-demand TV (especially via PVRs). It's that simple.

Re:Excellent Point!

[mjh]

Brilliant! (+1,Insightful - virtual moderator point)

Of course, I never intended my argument to include premium channels. Premium (i.e. non-advertising channels) have to be done on a subscription basis, since the primary value they offer is to the subscriber (no commercials) instead of to the advertiser (lots of eyes/ears).

All I want is to be able to hear my favorite sports teams from anywhere in the country... for the price of my having to listen to advertisements. You can have your prem channels, and I can have my sports.

Like I said: Brilliant!

Free receivers are the key

[Karl Cocknozzle]

Radio's biggest advantage is LOCAL INFORMATION, in the car. Neither Sirius nor XM offers any local programming. Are you willing to pay $400 plus a monthly sur-charge so you can change the station to decide whether to take an alternate route?

Also, besides those of you who bought a new Cadillac this year (congratulations, by the way, on a fine purchase!) who has $400 to spend for just a radio? Why not buy a portable MP3 player and plug it into your existing car stereo? This still gives you digital audio out the wazoo, and you're not roped into a monthly subscription (not to mention proprietary hardware that will be useless if the vendor goes out of business on January 1, 2003.)

My final point: Unless the price on the receivers comes down to cheap or free, before the end of 2002, these companies simply won't survive, because they will not achieve wide acceptance without cheap receivers: There are too many other sources of potential digital entertainment in the car.

XM is great...

[raam]

Got it installed with my alpine head and it is soooooweeet. The talk radio is ESPECIALLY robust, with bbc, cnn, cnnfn, bloomberg, cnbc, headline, usa today, c-span...you name it. Killer for those of us who use our gray matter...

Internet Access via Satellite Radio

[ShaggusMacHaggis]

One interesting concept of Satellite Radio is that it is possible to transmit data channels. Yes, this means that it is possible to transmit web pages and the like through satellite radio.

If you have a portable satellite radio (for example Hitachi worldspace digital receiever) you can get an adapter for it that will allow you to connect it to a computer and have it act as a modem. I believe it transmits at about 64k, slightly better than a 56k.

We are actually using this system where I work to transmit climate information to rural communites in africa (who then can translate the information into the local language and broadcast it over FM radio..pretty cool, and extremely useful).

We partner with the Worldspace Foundation to provide this information over the satellite data stream.

I is also the Worldspace Corporation (different than the foundation), but related.

So I wonder if XM and Sirrus have something like this up their sleeve. (I'm not sure if the systems are similiar or not)

Yeah but...

[gpinzone]

Satellite radio opens the possibility of having separate channels like "death metal", "doom metal", and "speed metal". This level of granularity beats even the best college radio stations (unless what you REALLY want is local music, in which case you should just buy the CDs to support them anyway).

Sounds awesome to me, but I wonder if either service has that level of granularity for hard rock or are they just running multiple top40s broadcasts? Is there a channel listing with the artists that are commonly played? I'd like to know before I buy it and find out their definition of "death metal" is Jethro Tull.

Re:Why I want Satelite Radio. Why I won't buy it.

[mjh]

Wouldn't a regular cable channel like comedy central be willing to take some of their revenue from commercials and pay a satellite company to broadcast their signal nation wide for free. If they did this, wouldn't their user base would sky rocket enough to cover the cost

Bingo! And once their viewers increase, they can justify the added costs for the advertising space that they sell.

(+1,Insightful) Virtual moderator point for you!

XM radio rocks!

[PatJensen]

As a current XM subscriber in Fresno, CA I commute daily to the South Valley (Tulare/Visalia). For an almost hour long one-way drive, I was forced to listen to the same old crap. I listen to jazz, techno/trance, a bit of gangsta rap and I love the non-stop stand up comedy on the way to work. Puts me in a good mood in the morning.

Signal and quality is great! I have a Sony receiver (the silver and purple one) in my 2001 Honda Accord. Signing up online took me about 15 minutes, and it took another 40 minutes to drill the mounting bracket in and install my antenna inside my car by the back window cleanly (that was at night)

What a treat it was when I got it working. A majority of the good channels are unfiltered (cussing, racial slurs and various other profanity) is allowed if you are into that thing. The DJs are moderately cool.

Service is great. Only complaints I have are with the Sony deck, and they are: 1. Not enough presets, 2. Backlight and the LCD suck and will cause accidents if you attempt to read it while driving, 3. No direct station access on the remote (just presets, who thought of that?) The only places I've ever lost service is when you are in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Highway and you pass under a bridge. If you are going at least 50, you won't lose your tunes. Also, the overhangs at gas stations will cause your radio to chunk out "No signal".

Thought I'd pitch in my two cents. Fire off some questions if you have any.

-Pat

Be just like US cable...

[Archfeld]

You will pay for it, AND get the pleasure of being 'informed' of exciting new products as well (it is not a bug, it's a feature). Given that the RIAA will still dictate what you can here, receive a stipend for every song played I don't see how this is any better than FM unless you are a long haul trucker, or a cross country flyer. I agree there is the potential for a KILLER APP, but it won't make it to market...

Terrible choice of channels

[Anonymous Coward]

Please take a look at the channel listings. here. before talking about it.

Now, I would be willing to pay a lot of money for unlimited high quality of music, I'd say for up to $50 a month. But the channel listing tells me that these programs are not for any serious listeners. Now I am not an audiophile, but I can tell you what I'd like to see on paid radio: For example, under "Dance", there should be at 40-100 channels of specialty, like "techno", "house", "drum&base", "gothic/industrial", "jungle", "trance", "hip hop", "tango", "Son/Cuban", "Walts", "Twists/swing", "2step/cha cha", "rumba", "Conga", "country","disco" ... and on and on. Along with mixed style dance channels, like "club dance", "ballroom", "Salsa" and so on. It should be clear that everyone would benefit from the variety; sometimes you just happen to flip to a channel where you hear this incredible bluegrass tune that you really like, although you may have zero exposure to that type of music.

Classical music fans nationwide suffer from the lack of choice. If they spawn 100 classical music channels than I'm sure classical music fans have the pocket to purchase the subscription. But "The Greatest Music of the Last 1,000 Years?" give me a break. Why don't they just say it as it is: "the bubblegum classic channel." "the billboard top 20 underground music channel."

It doesn't take a lot of money to do so, either. Once the fix cost is invested, it doesn't take much to add channels. Underground musicians don't ask for a lot of money to spread thier kind of music.

Do I wanna listen to Britney or backstreet boys on 100 channels? No.

I personally will subscribe and pay my dollars if they get at least 2 opera channels, 40 dance music channels, 1 spanish/classic guitar, one 30's, one 40's, ... one 90's, one 00's, 8 Jazz, 30 classical channels. 2 Asian, 10 Euro's, Gothic/Industrial, one middle east/Indian, one Maria Callas, one Bach, one Mozart, one Piano concertos, one Baroque, one Dead Can Dance... you got the picture. I'm not saying that "No doubt" or "Snoop dog" aren't good, but these are the music we are force fed. I want to know what's really out there. I don't want to listen to whatever the RIAA tells me to listen to. Unfortunately, the MX is doing just that - force feeding us the RIAA tunes.

Buffering -- how can it?

[NewtonsLaw]

You say "For those who don't know, the signal is also buffered by several seconds which keeps it from dropping out. It works great"

How the hell can it handle drop-outs when it's a one-way data-stream?

CD players and media streamed over a 2-way link can be buffered against drop-outs because you can always go back and re-read the lost data. How on earth are you supposed to do this with a one-way satellite stream.

Please explain -- inquiring minds need to know!

Re:Buffering -- how can it?

[kerch]

Perhaps "deeply intervleaved" is more accurate. As I understand it, the information required for any one sample in the audio stream is spread out over many seconds of the received data, with some redundancy. Short dropouts in the received data will still allow complete reconstruction, or perhaps inoffensive degradation, of the audio. Longer dropouts will cause the audio to mute.

Re:What about us sports junkies? = we're screwed?

[sallen]

What about me? The sports junkie? I could listen to sports events/talk the entire time I'm in the car. ..... some deleted .... All though many on /. would like to think that the world is filled with others like them, the fact is everyone on here is most likely the minority. Some, myself included, would spend $10 /month getting live coverage of sports/news events.

I drive about 1800 round trip every 5-6 weeks or so. I usually end up finding ESPN radio most of the way on local stations (granted, AM). But how much broadcasting of actual sports events can they do if there isn't localization, due to blackout rules. I, and my car, could be in Chicago, but if I want to listen to a Yankees or Mets or Rangers of Knicks game and my car is registered in NJ or NY, do I not get it? I'd end up going back to the local stations to actually listen. I don't think I'd pay the freight. ALSO... They have flat rate per device, no 'additional' units like sat or cable tv, etc. So if I have it in car, truck, and home, the price really just tripled. Add the taxes, you're talking around $40/mo. To me that's a little much JUST for radio. I might be interested if I could pay a few bucks per additional unit, like the others. But not the whole fee.

Figures lie, liars figure, I figure it's a loss

[Spamalamadingdong]

1999 populations, from askjeeves.com:

Montana: 882,779
N. Dakota: 633,666
S. Dakota: 733,133
Wyoming: 479,602
Total: 2,728,180

The total population of those four states is about what one of those services needs as a subscriber base to break even. You'd need an awfully high subscription rate to make much of your money there.

You missed the lesson

[Spamalamadingdong]

Adding satellite radio to the trucks would make them more expensive and drive up the upkeep. Why should a rental agency spend the money when it's obvious that people will pay to rent a truck with a broken radio? Budget, Ryder and U-Haul will spend money to keep their losses down and revenue up, so they'll do things like tracking their vehicles by satellite so they can schedule better. Satellite radio is a non-starter for them.

This will be as big as cable.

[DaeDaLuS6668]

If the satellite companies can get three or six month subscriptions added to every car sold with the sat radios standard (think DELL and MSN),

AND

local coverage is available within a short timeframe (Local weather, traffic reports, etc.), you will see Sat Radio become as big as cable, and the media giants will be buying these companies in droves.

Someone else said, "Ease of availability for consumers." They are right! Putting these radios in autos is a no-brainer. Adding this capability to your stereo receiver is also a no-brainer. Hopefully the technology can get past the music industry's stranglehold on new formats.

Either way, it'll be interesting to watch the paths taken in developing and marketing this technology.

Agreed, Ads are getting out of hand

[MO!]

I'm getting extremely sick of the assumption by marketers that I'm fair game everywhere I go and everything I do. I just recently watched 2 movies in the theatre and was appalled that after paying $8.50 per "adult" - which included my 14 year old sister (funny she's not "adult" enough to vote, drink, drive, etc...) - I had to sit through not only the still frame billboard type ads, but also 2 actual TV-type commercials before the previews and then finally the movie started. An entire 15 minutes of MY time wasted through this crap when I paid to see the MOVIE.

My point, I also would not pay for commercially sponsered radio, whether Satellite, broadcast, digital, Mother Goose, or whatever. If I pay for it - I don't want to see or hear a single advertisement.

Re:Agreed, Ads are getting out of hand

[Anonymous Coward]

And this is why I am always at least 10 minutes late to any cinematographical events. I avoid comericals this way and do not have to sit in the auditorium, with who knows what type of sick, demented creatures, while waiting for the motion picture to comence. In essence if something throws you off course, make an appropriate correction or end up crashing into a planetoid.

A travel channel

[swb]

Better yet would be a "driving channel" tailored to U-Haul's needs; reports on weather, traffic and construction problems, along with emergency info ("Smash your truck?") and the helpful hints you mention.

The advantage is that 99% of the content could be re-used for Ryder and the rest of the rental community (eg, drop in vendor-specific info) *and* they could re-use the rest of the time for a national "travel" channel that others would be paying for, including commercials. It'd be like 10 channels, 9 for rental cos and 1 legit "travel" channel that shared 95% of the content. That's a no-brainer.

Pay now, free later

[Anonymous Coward]

All you folks complain about commercials...this is not the reason for this post, but well personally, I don't mind them, even paying monthly - the benefits of the service far outweigh that....anyway...others of you are whining about paying a monthly fee for a service that required a ton of cash up front by a company to take a huge risk for you to get it....anyway

How much you wanna bet that once subscriptions are up, advertising revenue will jump....when they break even things will be good....perhaps that eventually advertising revenue will rise so high that they can eliminate monthly fees? ...I don't see how Sirus can ever do that, btw, despite their slightly higher audio quality (and I am an audiophile, and AGAIN, the huge benefits outweight some of the artifacting I hear, if I care about listening to something that much I'll buy the CD -- and I WILL NOT listen to it in the car with all that background road noise!!!!)

..and I'm guessing that some of those new cars with XM already installed will have a service contract that will be built into the new car price...just a guess...

Re:I've got it! TiVo for car radio!

[Anonymous Coward]

I do have a Radio PVR (or should that be PRR?) actually ;)

I bought a DAB Digital Radio for my PC and it records all the stuff in my schedule, because of the nature of DAB you can also record everything in the same multiplex simultaneously. For instance, at the moment it's recording BBC Radio 1 and Radio 4, I can also listen or record anything other stations within the BBC mux. I don't have to worry about adverts on the BBC stations but you can edit tunes from the commercial stations using Cool Edit or something like that.

Everything is recorded in the native MP2 format (with 48,000 sampling :), and can be transcoded into MP3 easily. A little known fact is MPEG1/2 audio was originally created for DAB, of course it's developed a life of its own on the net.

and wouldn't we pay for...

[The Cat]

Not ever again having to listen to those #%)&@$*#% radio commercials OVER AND OVER AGAIN!!!!! I'm reminded of the Simpsons episode where Homer "reacts" to the guy that said he invented the "two people talking" commercial format. :)

If I hear that Smart n' Final "professional chef" commercial or that stupid "O come all ye file folders" Office Supply place commercial again, I'm going to perform an "instant disassembly" on my radio.

The morning show on our talk station does TWELVE MINUTE COMMERCIAL BREAKS TWICE AN HOUR!!! That's just wrong.

There just might be a market for satellite radio if they can reduce the advertising to at least tolerable levels.

I could care less.

[Blind Demiurge Ialda]

I don't want some DJ in a booth deciding what I listen to. If I decide that I want to listen to a song by The Cure now, and then a few songs by Iron Maiden, and then an organ piece by Bach, then that's what I want to listen to.

How do I get what I want? Two words: Ogg Vorbis. I get the CDs I want, dump 'em to Vorbis, and roll my own playlist. I don't need satellite radio, when I've got over 500 hours of high quality classical music and European heavy metal on ~/music.

wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Germans pay for the right to watch tv period. There are truck that drive around with equipment to check if you're watching TV illegally.

Re:MCA? A Troll?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who said anything about interesting? He brings home the simoleons ("gets responses", for all you playing at home) and is modded down on Geekizoid. That spells T-R-O-L-L in my book.

Profanity

[DarkHelmet]

Would Satellite radio fall under the same "seven word" rules that the FCC typically fines radio stations for breaking? Or would Satellite Radio be like HBO, where they can say whatever they want?

Re:XM radio - Frank Ahrens does not know shit

[Anonymous Coward]

Frank Ahrens is a dumb prick. Just listen to the Don and Mike show - they wrote a whole series of skits about him. You could shove a radio up Frank's ass and he still would not know the difference between that and his lover's man meat.

Re:US lagging again?? -- not.

[lophophore]

WGBH-FM in Boston was transmitting digital audio in the mid-80s as an experiment. They were sending high-speed data over their UHF TV (Channel 44) -- you needed a special receiver to listen. I doubt it was compressed much, if at all. But with 6 MHz of bandwidth, it would not need to be compressed. I never listened to it, but I did tune in and look at the funny stuff on the TV screen.

What planet are you from?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cable TV started as a way to get clear reception and in the beginning only retransmitted the broadcast channels. People paid for it because of the clear picture and the extra choice as usually there were channels you could not otherwise receive.

Re:I've got it! TiVo for car radio!

[affegott]

doh... it's an UK thing. :-(

Seems like it would be a pretty easy device to build. You can get RAM for almost nothing these days. I would throw a 128 Meg cache on there, and maybe another tuner. It could get very interesting.

Later,
Affe

Aye aye matey

[gibbled]

Does anyone know the frequency, scrambling method etc?

I wonder if there will be black market trade in descrambling devices and information as there is with satellite television broadcasts?

Re:I've got it! TiVo for car radio!

[Anonymous Coward]

"doh... it's an UK thing. :-("

It's actually a World thing, even Canada, and South America, basically everywhere but the US because your broadcasters don't want to budge from their entrenched positions, so they lobby for a system based on political and commercial whims rather than technical sense, hence the IBOC system which seems dead in the water.

With DAB, if you added another tuner you could get two multiplexes at once which would allow you to record around 12-15 stations at once. IBOC doesn't use multiplexing because of bandwidth constraints, so you'd need a tuner for each 'in band' channel.

Advertising I won't pay to see or hear

[Anonymous Coward]

I too agree completely. But my actions are slightly more consistent with my desire to not subsidize advertising with my subscription money.
I do not get subscription TV of any kind (cable, satellite, microwave, etc.) because nobody has put together a package that allows me to only buy commercial-free TV. All the so-called 'a la carte' solutions are not truly a la carte. They all require you to buy some basic package consisting of channels containing ads then buy the other channels on top of that.

I will not buy subscription radio because it will have ads. I pay my ISP because they don't spam me with ads to upgrade my service plan (and the ads I see online don't count because the entire Internet is not under the control of my ISP). My ISP allows me to buy the account I desire and leaves me the hell alone. The only time I hear from them is when I call them to renew my subscription.

I'm not at a loss for music, my local library has more CDs than I can listen to and they get more CDs every day. I have requested some CDs they didn't have and they bought them to add to their collection and automatically loaned the disc to me first (public libraries are so incredibly cool).

I'm not at a loss for news. Newspapers are available at the library, my neighbors get them and read them and let me have them when they're done. Slashdot readers point to or reprint interesting articles from papers I can't easily get. My family forwards URLs to interesting articles online. I don't need to read the papers just as they come out. I can wait a few hours for my neighbor to be done with them (assuming I'm interested in reading them in the first place; often I'm not that interested). Thanks to the unhealthy homogenization of popular news that squelches the little players, there is plenty of the same news available on TV and radio that I don't pay subscription fees to receive.

I'm not at a loss for anything subscription media has to offer. I see no point in purchasing myself a subscription to this new form of subscription media.

I know most people don't think like I do; most people will pay for advertising. They will feel like they are missing something if they go to a movie theatre and don't see ads for other movies (commonly called "trailers"--the terminology alone is a sign of just how intrenched paying for ads is. Some moviegoers who miss these ads when they are absent are completely comfortable balking at the showing of other ads like soda ads--as if those other ads infringe on their fun. But I digress.). I think paying for advertising is ridiculous and I refuse to do it.

(No, I don't buy clothing with logos on it like a famous brand name's t-shirt or jogging pants. There is plenty of otherwise comparable logo-free clothing available at reasonable prices at the local shops).

Ground repeaters are controversial

[ChrisCampbell47]

The NAB is up in arms about the radio repeaters that XM and Sirius plan to use to fill out their signal in urban/multipath areas.

See:

• Google cache of the NAB position
• Washington Post article
• further concerns about lack of "public service" programming

And before you shit all over the idea of public service, recall that the airwaves are supposed to be public property, not to be whored out by the government to the biggest soft-money contributor. The Telecom act of 1995 changed all that, and ClearChannel and their ilk are taking advantage of the situation faster than you can say "defanged FCC".

Support your local non-comm radio station!

The End of The Age of Pirate Radio

[Dan Crash]

I hate it when I catch an interesting Slashdot thread 484 comments too late.

But here's what bugs me about satellite radio:

1. Unlike AM/FM broadcasters, satellite broadcasters use a digital signal, which puts them under the scope of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings Act, and other statutes dealing with digital transmission of sound.

One effect of this is that XM and Sirius have to pay *double* the royalties of a traditional AM/FM station -- they have to license both the musical work copyright AND the digital transmission performance right, same as regular ol' webcasters do. (And you wondered why they play commercials AND ask for money.)

2. If satellite radio reaches a critical market share, it will force AM/FM broadcasters into even *blander* programming. Think of network TV before and after cable, "Roots" vs. "Temptation Island". Who cares? You might; it'll essentially force you to pay to hear decent radio.

3. The FCC and esp. little Michael K. Powell would love to sell off the dinosaur AM/FM spectrum. If satellite radio proves itself as an alternative model in the next few years, it will finally give them the excuse to do so. When that day comes, you can forget about getting out your soldering iron and building an FM transmitter and getting on the air. Important critical voices and great low power stations will be lost forever. Nothing can replace that.

Re:Why I want Satelite Radio. Why I won't buy it.

[ecampbel]

You're very wrong.

The reason both cable and satellite companies charge about the same price is that they both have to pay ESPN and the other big cable channels for the rights to air their singles. The commercials these channels air only cover part of their cost. So, just like cable companies, satellite operators do pay an incremental cost per viewer.

Only a small part of your $30-$40 a month cable bill goes to maintaining your cable line. In fact, many cable companies offer a very basic plan for under $10 month that only includes the local channels such as ABC, NBC, and CBS. This means the price to maintain your cable line has to be under $10 a month.

I imagine at least half of XMS's fee, goes to the networks on their service, not into their pockets, so if they gave away their service for free, they'd be loosing money on each subscriber.

WorldSpace

[rmathew]

Have you Americans never heard of WorldSpace, a digital satellite radio service that we've had for some time now?

Re:WorldSpace

[netwerk]

Didn't you know that America invented *, and were the first in the world to get *? :)

Re:Why I want Satelite Radio. Why I won't buy it.

[ecampbel]

Cable channels such as Comedy Central already subsidize the costs to air their channel by allowing cable and satellite companies to insert their own commercials into some of the commercial breaks. So, in effect, they are paying Cable companies to broadcast their signal.

With half of America already subscribing to Cable or satellite television, Comedy Central doesn't need more potential viewers; they just need those who already have their channel to watch more of it.

Finally, if the analysis you and the poster above has given is correct, don't you think your plan would have already been put into place?

100 audio channels sounds like very little ??

[Anonymous Coward]

Compared to TV satellites the provision of 100 audio channels sounds very minor.
I wonder if the birds are 'small' just designed for this requirement or can they handle additional stuff.

I would hope the latter.
Some ideas:
1. Rebroadcast some audio stations from various areas of the country. Detriot Blues station etc...
2. Do they/can they support additional services like traffic conditions for the highway you are on?
3. More international stations (other than BBC). Why not Armed Forces Radio, Radio Sweden, German, French, Local Liverpool station that plays local groups including the next Beetles etc...

I'm curious how much bandwidth the birds have and how much each channel uses. Are they at 100% ?

music? who said anything about music?

[Anonymous Coward]

The one thing I can get from radio that I can't get from anything else is talk radio. And if XM can do a better job at that plus give me CNN, Fox News, ESPN sports news, etc then I'm all for it.

Re:FCC rules & regulations [OT: OSX spell chec

[Anonymous Coward]

U musta learned da spellcheckmabob to undastand dat fsck be's a real werd! ;-)

...I don't see it listed anyway. *shrugs*

Oh, if you teach it fuck and type fsck and check it it suggests fuck as a correct spelling (if fsck isn't in the dictionary already, I'd assume).

Cable and commercials.

[Convergence]

At one time, about 15 years ago when I was 8, Cable TV didn't have commercials at all. They had breaks in the program, but those breaks were advertisements for other programs.

They didn't have commercials.. I wonder what law got changed that let them both increase prices, and force commercials down our throats. And cable TV survived too!

Re:MCA? A Troll?

[Whom The Bell Trolls]

That describes every single person on /. Next, you are going to say, "Slashdot is full of trolls." Blah, blah, blah.

No, you are mistaken, and I understand that it is hard for you to admit you are incorrect.

Man, you guys are busier than I realized

[Anonymous Coward]

Every single person on Slashdot gets responses to insulting and non-factual posts from Geekizoid Editors? Damn, you must have a metric buttload of accounts here...

Re:Why I want Satelite Radio. Why I won't buy it.

[Phisch2]

So if channels like Comedy Central are already willing to effectively pay cable companies to broadcast their signal, then they would obviously be willing to pay for a satellite company to broadcast it. The question is how much? Apparently the cumulative total that can be generated from channels like these is less then the cost of launching and running a satellite. Competition and better technology keeps driving prices from companies like Disk Network and Direct TV lower and lower. I look forward to the day when the new offer it "100 channels for $0 per month, with free installation.... commercial free channels extra"

Room for all technologies

[Slider451]

Though FM radio is superior in broadcast quality and has been around over 40 years, AM radio is still doing well.

Cable TV didn't kill broadcast TV, despite (bogus) promises of superior content and quality. Same for satellite TV.

Satellite radio will provide a new service (with a new revenue method), which may be embraced by a large enough group to make it profitable. But there is no reason the old technologies (and revenue methods) won't continue to be viable for decades to come.

P.S. Any guess on how long traditional TV will last once HDTV hits critical mass? I'm thinking at least another 20 years.

Re:Room for all technologies

[Dan Crash]

Any guess on how long traditional TV will last once HDTV hits critical mass? I'm thinking at least another 20 years.

That'll be kinda hard once the FCC reclaims and sells off the NTSC spectrum. Unless you like static.

The future of digital radio in the US is anyone's guess right now. There's satellite, IBOC, spread spectrum proposals, and more. Keeping those in mind, and looking at current FCC policy, however, I wouldn't be so sure your current FM radio is still going to be good 10 years from now.

...why not

[Transcendent]

Just make large scaled wireless (yet with actual good encryption) internet, then you could stream online radio for just the cost of your internet connection... even if you just listen to it in your car, your passenger could be browsing online with laptops, or even if you're just sittin somewhere in a park, coffie house, or anywhere... The selection you get with online radio is huge... practically limitless...

(after thought)

[Transcendent]

...If your internet connection at home is good enough... you could listen to your own collection you have on your computer... It'll be like a portible MP3 player with the capacity of your hard drive at home...

Re:I WILL pay for XM.

[Anonymous Coward]

I *like* MP3. It's a great way to keep 50-60 CD's worth of music on my desktop computer. Even at 192kb/s, the disk space is cheap.

But when I'm listening to music for the pleasure of listening to it, the dull, compressed sound of MP3 just doesn't cut it. (XM *does* have some compression, but I'm not sure how much. I could hear a very slight difference when they were playing a Fatboy Slim CD that I also happened to have in my changer)

Creed sounds just fine on MP3 as long as you don't turn it up loud. Thelonius Monk, on the other hand, doesn't take well to compression. :-)

PS: I suspect that copper makes a more practical speaker cable than gold.