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Satellite Radio Subscriptions Rising
aSiTiC writes "Apparently, satellite radio is finally catching on. I'm an avid internet radio listener on stations such as KEXP, BBC 6Music and SomaFM. I am looking for a more portable alternative and I wonder if eventually my favorite MP3/RM/WMA internet stations will be ever be carried on satellite."
Just setup a radio with WiFi access, and a good antenna, and hop on to unsecure networks! No one will notice... probably.
I subscribe to XM, and have a recurring problem. 200 channels and still nothing good to listen too. Satellite radio will never surpass a case of CDs and a CD player, and will always be a niche market.
I recently received an XM radio. I used to be unimpressed with these services but the breadth of radio stations is actually quite good. With C-NET and Headline news I can keep up on events quite easily. The quality is phenomenal and it has become a cool way to find out about a lot of music I wouldn't otherwise be exposed to.
I have not had any experience with SIRIUS yet. Can anyone here attest to it's quality?
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troll blacklist. Please mo
I am sure that someone like Sirius or Delphi could pound out a deal with Shoutcast or live365 so that certain stations like SomaFM: Groove Salad and the real popular ones could be broadcast over satelite. I am also sure that if anyone does this that their subscription rates would top their competitors by about a month after they introduced this. Furthermore, it could really ignite a grassroots movement for internet broadcasters to try to become Satelite broadcasters. The entire market would improve.
I don't play MMORPG's because I don't wanna pay to play something I've already bought. Same with XM radio. The biggest jump for me is the leap of faith that I'll like the music. I listen to my local college station so I can get in some good punk rock listening. When they're not on the air, I usually do classical. Since I'm sure they have classical, it begs the question:
Do they have a punk station? If so, what kind of punk?
Sat radio providers have some sort of responsibility similar to network providers' uptime responsibility. By providing access to internet-based 'radio' stations, they are allowing for the possibility that a customer, paying a monthly subscription, would try to listen to one of these stations, only for it to be out of service for one reason or another.
Now whether or not such an outage would be XM's (sirius, etc) fault, the average user would blame XM because it wasn't "just working" like average users need.
The stations that they're broadcasting right now are substantial and well-backed enough so that the sat providers need not worry about such issues. And even if that's not enough, they probably have contracts that ensure (or at least offer financial relief in lieu of) such reliability.
XM is only 9.95 a month (after hardware investment) and so far I have heard my favorite band, XTC, more than I ever did on commercial radio. Listening to Dead Kennedys right now.
Of course if you don't want to listen to Sat radio then head to the Future of Rock and Roll at WOXY.COM. 97X - BAM! The Future of Rock and Roll (As seen in Rainman!). They stream over the 'net and are playing such delicious artists right now like the New Pornographers, Beulah and the Twilight Singers. Find THAT on your local alterna-pop, cock-rock rotating channel owned by the Borg (read: Clear Channel).
Sadly Clear Channel DOES have a stake in XM.
I was talking about this the other day. Satellite Radio is not something that most people need, unless you're in a part of the country without much solid radio coverage. What most people need, and would find far more useful, is RadioTivo. A product which could record your favorite shows when they're on and let you play them back at your discretion.
A friend was recently telling me about a show on NPR which plays bad cover songs... now that sounds great! However, I'm really not in the car often enough to chance onto finding it, so I'll probably never hear it. But with RadioTivo, I could tell it to seek and record those programs which interest me and skip the trash. Just imagine being able to listen to your favorite morning disk jockey at any time during the day, and with no commercials! You could have RadioTivo record a few days of your favorite station (not a problem because the amount of space required to record broadcast radio on your RadioTivo is minimal) and skip not only commercials, but those songs you don't like. In fact, we could have our high tech researches program RadioTivo to understand when one song ends and the next begins and add a Skip to the next song button. RadioTivo is the answer.
Am I the only person who's thought of this? I've never heard anyone mention it before. Too bad I don't have the patience or the capital to make this happen. Oh well, I'll send Tivo an email and the sue them when they come up with the idea on their own.
I hearby copyright the concept of RadioTivo (although clearly not the name, someone else holds the copyright to that.)
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RumorsDaily
I got Sirius because I commute, and let me tell you, it's absolutely wonderful. If you think that satellite radio is only a niche market, I guess commuters are a niche market. The Merrian-Webster dictionary defines niche has d) a specialized market. I spend every day on Interstate 405 driving to work. I'd hardly consider the thousands of people who commute over that freeway a niche market. Anyhow, enough of that rant...
Yes, it's $12.95/mo, and XM is $9.95. For that $3, I get more channels and NO commercials (other than telling me about Pam Anderson's radio show).
It's also nice to drive from my place in Los Angeles to see my family in Bakersfield and never have to change my station.
I still carry CDs with me, but thanks to Sirius, I get exposed to new music and buy more CDs (the record companies should be happy about that)...
Advertisers always look at anything as an advertising channel that they have some right to stuff with their .. ads. Billboards, buses, your clothing, foreheads, whatever. The day after someone makes the Paint the Moon trick work, count on advertising up there. (Especially since no one owns the Moon.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Since XM has more than 2 million songs stored in its databases, I rather doubt that you could carry that much around, no matter how good your compression scheme. They have several large databases, the largest of which is 28TB, spinning hard disks.... And they plan to increase this substantially. Their setup would make your average geek drool. Every studio or workstation has access to every one of the song titles, even if you are in one of the remote studios in New York or Nashville.
More to your point, I own a little over 1400 CDs and I still subscribe to XM. WHY? Because I can never own all of them, nor do I have time to audition every new one that comes out. XM's folks do listen to all of them - and the good ones get airplay. Even the ones not signed by a label. It seems to me I have more control than I have ever had before - I am exposed to a very wide varity that I have never heard before.
Those of us who are serious internet broadcasters have quite good uptime. And the downtime we have is easily fixed by spending a little extra money - like having backup playback workstations and using T1s instead of DSL to feed our stream repeaters.
For example, SomaFM runs several of our channels with OtsDJ, an inexpensive but quite capable and professional broadcast playback and stream encoding solution. These instances often have uptime of 60-90 days between restarts, so reliability there is not a problem.
The majority of our downtime comes from the SDSL line that we use to feed the stream repeaters from our studio. If we spent $1500 a month more and put a pair of T1s in a failover config. The rest of our outages come from ISP peering problems, where one of our stream repeaters is seeing a lot of packet loss from it's feeder.
We have UPS power that will run the machines and network at the studio for over an hour, and for $5000 could put in a generator with auto start and a auto transfer switch.
As far as getting the audio back to the Sat providers head end, we could do one of several things: use a Harris Intraplex and a frame relay circuit or just install one of their encoders here connected by an ISDN or fractional T1 frame relay private network. (Most sat channels are 80kb/sec or less,)
It's not rocket science to make an "internet class" radio station as reliable as a commercial over the air station.
-rusty/somafm
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