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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.
As Satellite Radio becomes more popular, watch for in increase in ads / spam a la The Internet.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
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.
For those wanting to know this is their website. And these are the channels they carry.
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.
old enough to remember ON tv, we can see whats coming.
ON tv was on of the first cable TV. it cam with a set top box that had a knob with 2 positions ON and OFF. change to chanel 3 or 4, turn it on, instant commercial free movies, no restrictions.
Copar it to cable TV now. there is a lot more channels, but most of them have commersials. If you want to see something commercial free, you have to pay more on top of your basic service.
Satalite radio will go the same way. within 8 years, you'll have commercial, unless you pay for premium content.
There is a lesson in there, somewhere.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I've had Sirius since this past march and I have to say that I'm a big fan of the content, but not as big a fan of the sound quality. The Sound quality on the music stations shows quite a bit of obvious compression artifacting. Also, the techo stations seem to have an obscene amount of bass boast present.
/month :-)
All in all though, I've been rather happy with it and I'll gladly continue to fork over the 12.95
-Chris
--an unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys--
If your interests in music fit in a small miche, you may be better served by CD's. That doesn't work for news, hovever.
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
The 24-hour CNET Radio died quite a while ago. CNET no longer controls 910 KNEW Oakland or 890 WBPS, and the web stream has been kicked back to the semi-regular 5-minute bursts that they had back when they first started.
:)... It's a ghost of its former self and is just screaming for XM to consolidate Online Tonight into one of its other talk formats to free up the channel slot. They'll likely do it the next time they realign the channels, but since that's only happened once so far it's hard to tell when they'll do that again.
The "CNET Radio channel" on XM is now David Lawrence's 3-hour synidcated show (that CNET never owned, they just rented) called Online Tonight and that's it. The same 3 hour show repeated 8 times a day.
More detailed listing here(include samples)
I will never pay money to listen to the radio. Granted, it may be commercial free now, but how long do you think that will last? Not long. Cable TV used to be like that until there was a massive enough audience to justify advertising expenses. Right now, the primary reason why there is no advertizing on sattilite radio is due to the lack of audience to advertize to.
I will never pay money to watch TV, or listen to the radio. I could really give a crap less if the signal is clearer, and there are more channels to choose from. If I can't pick up TV free over the air, or radio, I will just start watching more movies, and listen to my CD's. I won't pay for garbage when I can get the same old shit for free.
How good do you think your reception will be in the mountains? You won't pick up squat. The sattilites are going to be blocked by the mountains, and you will not get any signal. If you don't belive me, biuld a brick wall in front of your DishTV feedhorn, and see how much you pick up. You either get crystal-clear reception, or none. At least wih analoque brodcasts, I can pick it up almost anywhere. There may be some static, but not total loss of signal. The same goes with HDTV, but that is a completly different subject.
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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)...
Anyone who does a fair bit of travelling in a car can tell you that talk radio is a much better companion than music after about 3 hours. Previously I had a head unit that could play mp3-cds and I would routinely fill a disc withb audiobooks or clips from my favorite radio program (Howard Stern) which proved to be an invaluable trip companion. I thought the lack of mp3-cd capability would be awful for me, but XM is filling the gap nicely. There's lots to chose from -- ESPN for Sports, CNN and Fox News for headlines, and E! and Discovery radio for other special interest programming. The other night I had to drive around the block a few times as the Jesse Ventura E! True Hollywood Story finished. So, if you are looking for XM for music, you will be pleasently surprised but not blown away. For talk radio, it really is tough to beat, especially when you don't have to worry about losing signals as you move around.
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Take it sleazy,
-The Shockmaster
DON'T DO IT!
Remember free tv? Now we are all hostage to cable companies for our tv, broadcast is a joke. Yeah, you can do it, but lets face it, few do.
Don't make our future include "remember free radio?" Boycot this stupid idea.
Yeah, no commercials, I know. Right. That'll last until quarterly profits start slipping and they can't raise rates anymore.
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.
Iridium needed a worldwide network of satellites with decent bandwidth and lots of other features. XM uses a couple satellites, Sirius probably the same. They only cover North America and only have a limited bandwidth that they need to provide. Maybe they could even lease excess capacity on their satellites to other companies. At any rate, it's a totally different and much cheaper business model than Iridium.
Yes, but it's 72 satellites for iridium versus 3 for Sirius and 2 for XM. That's a heck of a lot less infrastructure to launch and maintain. And, as you can see from the subscription numbers, there is demand for these products.
When you multiply 1.2 million * $10 / month * 12 months/year, you get $144 million in a year. For certain, it's more money than SCO brought in last year.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
With satelite radio is the same problem with multiplayer ONLY games...
If you want me to PAY for your service, give me the hardware...or if you want me to pay for the hardware, give me choice (or give me the service)...
The fact remains that XM hardware only works with XM service, therefore the hardware is useless otherwise...
If they're gonna charge for the hardware, they should provide additional functionality (like MP3/OGG) or a free alternative (like a free basic service level).
One way of essentially giving away the hardware would be to include XM or Sirius in new vehicles (buy a new Ford, get XM radio)...the major advantage here is that they could hide some of the cost in the complete sound package. The big selling point for this could be an upgraded stereo system (6-8 speaker system, mp3 CD, etc) or free service for a period of time (say 3-6 months)...
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
Oops.
I was going to get XM or Sirius setups for one or two relatives (as in, was at the store, had liked XM, but Sirius had a nicer receiver).
Too bad you couldn't obviously give people the actual subscriptions as gifts. Problem was, providing gifts as subscriptions exposed the fact that there was a subscription fee -- and if you look around the packaging and brochures, you'll find said fee is nowhere to be found (at least at the three stores I looked -- Fry's, Good Guys, and Best Buy).
Since there's no fee to be found, there's no "six month subscription" to be found either.
I wasn't about to give a gift that came with a recurring fee w/ no demo. So I bought something more interesting.
--Dan
Now, at a basic level, I'm sure a university is a corporation. And even a family operated business is still a business. But you would actually have to listen to 97x to understand the difference I suppose.
As quoted from their webpage "In a world where large--and larger--corporate radio groups dominate the radio landscape, 97X continues to be a family business owned by Doug & Linda Balogh. Family-business values are reflected in the culture that exists at 97X and are embodied in the people who create 97X, a group of dedicated and hard-working folks who truly care about THE music."
And Corporate radio still sucks. 97X WOXY does not.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order- Ed Howdershelt Via Tass