Slashdot Mirror
XM And SIRIUS Radio Merging
lenny6998 writes to tell us Yahoo! News is reporting that XM and Sirius Radio, the only two major players in the relatively new market of subscription satellite radio have announced a merger. "The two companies said in a statement that Mel Karmazin, the CEO of Sirius, would become chief executive of the new company while Gary Parsons, the chairman of XM, would remain in that role."
...before they decided to stop competing. I mean, are they really competition for each other?
This sig no verb.
Now monopoly.
Art Bell and Howard Stern together.
There goes the competition!
"No freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms." -- Thomas Jefferson
I had XM for a few months -- loved it for about 15 days. Then I was too lazy to extricate myself from the deal, so I turned it over to a friend who travels over the road a lot.
Since I had that subscription, I realized that satellite radio -- like all "one size fits all" radio, is dead. Honestly. It may not actually have died yet, but the days are numbered.
I have a great MP3 collection at home -- running on a (yes, lame) Windows Media Center PC with a ton of storage. I also have a bunch of my favorite movies encoded both for highdef and lowdef. Why? Because I can now access everything I "own" remotely.
My phone is an HTC Trinity P3600 -- currently unavailable in the States as far as I know. With the Dopod 810 ROM, I am able to utilize T-Mobile's EDGE network to my advantage. If I want to listen to my MP3s, I do so remotely using that EDGE network. Often times I am able to get a sustained 200kbps download rate, which drops to about 80kbps in more remote areas. For most of my travel (nationwide), I am able to listen to my entire playlist without having to carry with me anything more than my PDA phone. It works great -- and I can plug my phone into my car stereo and listen to my tracks at will. I even created a nice interface for picking songs, and it works great. I pay one flat rate for my EDGE connection, and for an additional $20 a month I also get unlimited use of Starbuck's WiFi network, which works great when I am really in the boonies.
Will most people do this right now? No, because the costs are a bit too high, and most people aren't technically adept enough to set it up. Yet those days are coming to a close as more people are buying cell phones that aren't locked by the vendor (T-Mobile loves to lock great features out of their cell phones, so I buy mine on the grey market). I've seen alpha versions of bittorrent-protocol software that runs on Windows Mobile, and I'm sure more is on its way for other phone/portable OSes. As this happens, we will soon see peer-to-peer "radio" stations taking over and giving the consumer what they REALLY want.
I'm sure that XM and SIRIUS will be watched closely by the "evil" FCC, but no matter what happens, their days/years ARE numbered. Regular radio is having a huge problem attracting advertisers, because the new generation now has iPods. The iPod is a great device, but it is limited to only what you brought from home.
If Microsoft wants to kill Apple, all they need to do is come up with an iPod-like player that has EDGE/GPRS connectivity, and offer people music-by-the-song or MP3-over-the-air accessibility. Imagine what will happen to the "broadcast" market when the unicast market can destroy it at any time?
A more interesting merger than XM and SIRIUS, is really now Howard Stern and Opie & Anthony being on the same network.
Can one satellite network handle two (well three) giant egos.
Let's find out.
-Teiresias
We already covered the FCC saying no. http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/2 2/2237249
Methinks it's time to buy a telescope to watch them merge the satellite!
Be relentless!
XM and Sirius have never been profitable. They have both lost hundreds of millions of dollars since their inception. So what good is a merger?
Every time this was rumored there were numerous posts stating this was not possible due to FCC restrictions on their licenses.
If true, it should be interesting to see how they work it out.
Are they going to consolidate the music stations? Offer identical options on both sets of hardware or keep things seperate but merge the overhead?
One of the reasons I picked Sirius was the music selection on the channels appealed to me more then on XM. Am I going to loose out now?
This has been talked about before but I've never heard what will actually change for the end user.
It might be nice to have some sort of Satellite Radio standard. So that you can buy a receiver then someday choose a provider, instead of everything being proprietary. Maybe it will lead to them offering some channels for free, and a subscription for others. I would listen to free satellite radio even if it had commercials. When you drive a couple hours in the same direction you're bound to lose signal and have to find another station, not so with satellite.
that the name of the merged company isn't iSatellite radio....
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
As a huge O&A/Ron & Fez fan, I hope that the new company gets rid of some of the redundant stations (do we need 4 Top 20 stations?) and allocate more bandwidth to new stations. Maybe the Hideout boys and Ron & Fez get their own station while The Virus goes 24/7 O&A. Every time Ron and Fez mention "big things" for their show, ELo (Eric Logan) mentions the bandwidth issue.
Also, as a Big XII Alumni (Baylor,) hopefully they'll give us an option to start listening to Sirius content on XM. Oh, and there is that little league called the NFL.
I'm also curious to see how Opie and Anthony live working umnder the same umbrella as Howard Stern. Time will tell.
What, me Tweet?
I bet they now regret cooking up their own incompatible proprietary broadcast protocols to lock their service to the equipment.
There is such a thing as open standards.
Evil people are out to get you.
I was wondering about that too. They either are so desperate for a merger that they'll take their chances with the FCC, or they've already talked with Martin and convinced him that it won't be anticompetitive.
Who knows, they may succeed in framing the competition issue as one applying to the streamed audio market, which encompasses radio, Internet radio, and sat radio. When discussing broadband, the FCC frequently defines the market rather broadly, incorporating dish access into the discussion, as if it is a serious market participant. Given their generally broad interpretation of communications markets, they (or at least Martin, Tate, and McDowell) may buy the argument.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
The thing everyone forgets is that monopoly isn't the problem: it's the abuse of monopoly to unfairly control a market.
XM and Sirius have so far both struggled for customers for several reasons, not the least of which being problems of customer awareness. Many people simply don't know - and won't learn without extensive research - which network would be better for them (in terms of content, quality and price). People are used to having one radio "network", expecting competitors to just be different channels. The idea of two separate networks with non-interoperable hardware just isn't what people want.
The question is how this new hybrid company (I love the AT&T joke...) will shape its new business model: if no other satellite companies emerge, will they offer channels 'for rent' to other content providers? Will they continue to own all channels? Etc.
"Stumble before you crawl"
You linked the word "monopolies" to the Wikipedia article "Natural monopoly". I dispute that broadcasting has to be a natural monopoly. In fact, the structure of broadcast licensing in the United States ensures that music radio broadcasting is a coercive monopoly. This is due to the FCC's foot-dragging on low-power FM station licensing, bought and paid for in part by XM investor Clear Channel Communications and by National Public Radio.
I remember when cable TV came out and it didnt have any advertisements, (yes, I'm really THAT old) the reasoning was, since your paying for the broadcast, you shouldnt "pay" for adversisments also. Well that was until they realized they could do ad's and still people would pay! With XM and Sirius, I predict they will begin to have ad's to. In doing so, they will hang themselves. This isnt like TV where good reception is a big issue.
All Corporations Merge Into OmniCorp
Saturday, Jan 1, 2000
UNITED NATIONS - In a multimedia press conference held Friday at the U.N., top executives from the world's three remaining corporations announced a final merger, uniting the planet's financial resources under the newly created OmniCorp.
Under the terms of the record $9.2 quadrillion merger, the Global Tetrahedron Conglomerate gains controlling shares of its two final competitors, Time-WarTurABCDis-SonylumbiaAT&T and GM-LockheedZweibSKGBank, creating what company spokespersons called "an unstoppable juggernaut wielding unparalleled wealth and power."
As a cost-saving measure, dealmakers also negotiated the absorption of all world governments into OmniCorp, making the corporate behemoth the sole ruler of mankind.
"We stand at the close of a century of progress and at a dawn of a new millennium," said OmniCorp spokesperson Ed Rohl. "One hundred years ago, the average working Joe was at the mercy of the big corporate trusts. Now, as a new century looms, we can celebrate just how far we have come."
Key members of OmniCorp's board of directors, including Walt Disney, were cryogenically unfrozen and revived by a team of shadow-government technicians. They are expected to assume overlord duties as early as Thursday.
We have all these laws to punish monopolies, and yet we allow monopolies to form without a blink of the eye. It is absolutely retarded. And all Roosevelt's fault for his "good trust", "bad trust" bastardization of the antitrust laws. We give the regulating bodies so much leeway in deciding when mergers are allowed and when they are not that, that it completely defeats the purpose of preserving a competitive market. Instead, they just abuse the law by offering weak resistance to mergers in order to coerce to companies into doing things and then let the merger go ahead once they are secured.
You want real anti-trust laws? Stop punishing companies for attaining a position that our laws encourage, and have fair formulaic restrictions on mergers to begin with - like any merger which would make you largest competitor in any given field is barred. Then small companies would be able to merge to the point where they could compete with the big boys (increasing competition), but big companies couldn't stifle up-and-coming competition.
Companies actually earning their customers rather than buying out the competition - that is what I call a competitive market. Which is why it will never happen - our politicians would much rather have their their government supported monopolies and oligopolies and call it free market, then implement real pro-market laws.
>The iPod is a great device, but it is limited to only what you brought from home.
What happens when you have every song ever released digitally on your iPod?
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
I've always liked XM better than Sirius for their indie and alternative channels. (I think sirius only has one named alt nation?) When I bought my 2007 BMW they wanted $600 to integrate Sirius. No XM was offered. I declined and instead opted for the $50 XM roady xt aftermarket. If this goes through how soon would auto makers offer the hybrid service? Right now GM and a few others offer XM while most imports offer Sirius. It would suck to buy a 2008 car and be locked into only one side's hardware.
We now have another monopoly with little chance of any kind of alternative as the barrier to entry is so high. I trust this means that there will be less content available than ever before. You'll only hear what's "popular" (ie. what they want you to buy this week). I'm just waiting for ClearChannel to buy the new company. Fortunately the only experience I've ever had with satellite radio is via DirecTV (another near monopoly that's hard to avoid if your local cable outlet sucks ass). Before they started touting their affiliation with XM, DirecTV used to have some "Digital Radio" channels. They were actually pretty good. Then the XP partnership happened and those channels were replaced with godawful crap.
My wife used to love the 80s music channel they had under the old system. But now they replaced that with "Ethel" or "Fred" or somesuch, and it sucks ass. The selection isn't as good as it used to be. And invariably they wind up throwing in stuff that doesn't even fit. The "80s" channel they have now has a "wider" definition (ie. only what they consider to be 80s instead of what was REALLY definitive 80s) of 80s in that it doesn't just feature punk and new wave stuff like the old one. Now they throw in all sorts of things (some of which aren't even 80s) that are vaguely "alternative" with the occasional crap country song thrown in. My guess is that since country is such a popular format (even though it sucks ass in my opinion) they are hoping that by dropping in an occasional tune, they might get some new buyers from people on the fence.
Yet another annoying factor is that the old system used to tell you on screen what was currently playing and which album it was from. It was very informative. The new system just gives you a little info and 90% of the time it's completely wrong. If that's what XM is like, then they can shove it. I hope they die a spectacular death because music lovers don't want satellite or subscription radio. Music lovers want a smörgåsbord of endless new and old music that is either thrown in as a "freebie" or totally free. And if the selection is varied enough, THEN and ONLY THEN will the music lover plunk down the cash for the goods. That's the way I roll. I listen to college radio and the BBC via the net (and I'm approaching 40) because in many markets it's the only place to hear good new music. If it's good enough, I check and see if eMusic has it and download it. If not, then I get it from Amazon on CD. Satellite radio is only for boring old people who still think Cadillacs are cool looking cars or who think they're being radical when they buy a modern Volkswagen Beetle. LastFM is about the only other option, but I fear that it will be pounced on by the big players and hence ruined once they reach a certain critical mass.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
As a Sirius subscriber, I'm a bit worried what a merger, if approved, might bring. They mention a more a la carte selection of channels. I read this as "tiered" pricing. If I had to guess, it sounds like it will be more modeled after the pay-for-tv pricing...i.e. you get a basic package for x dollars, a premium packages for y dollars, oh and you want the sports package? thats an extra z dollars. If it goes that route, I'm really going to have to reconsider if it is really worth it to me. Overall I've been happy with the Sirius service and choice of programming they've had. All for one price keeps it simple and affordable. Any changes to that, which are bound to happen in a merger like this, chances are the consumer loses.
Turns on trusty shortwave radio...
Holy crap a revolution! I get my radio for FREEEEEE!
crazy dynamite monkey
Will this merger affect my Playboy Radio? I mean I signed up to XM in the first place for it, and when they cancelled it, I cancelled my subscription... Now Sirus has it, I worry about if it will be dropped again...
Got to love Playboy radio...
3 degrees of separation from Vladimir Putin
Face it. The satellite-radio business is one that won't last. The idea of paying for commercial-free radio service is NOT going to generate enough customers to cover the cost of operating the business. Period! How many customers of XM or Sirrus are trial customers who got satellite-radio free for a year when they bought a new car? Lots I would suspect. How many of these people are really going to re-new their contracts? Not many I suspect.
This is simply a last ditch effort to keep themselves afloat. Nothing more. They'll be dead shortly. But at least Howard Stern would have made a pile of money.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
It's dumb. Dumb people is their demographic.
Ever since I was a small boy trying to get the FM reception just right, I've always wanted to pay for radio.
Not just listen to advertisements, That's not enough of a contribution.
Oh, and I wanted it to sound like it was in a box, with lots of neat clipping and compression artifacts, instead of free fuzzy fm frequencies.
sometimes, nothing.
Yahoo! News is not a news agency. They have no reporters. They have a license to publish news reported by various news agencies, such as the AP, Reuters, NYT, etc.
This particular article was reported by AP Business (Seth Sutel). The page even has the Associated Press logo at the top right.
Not very difficult.
Being a monopoly does not necessarily mean all of its behavior is monopolistic. Uncompetitive behavior by a monopoly can sometimes be illegal and bad. Being a monopoly is not illegal or even necessarily bad.
Speak truth to power.
Another post rightly points out that being a monopolist is not on its face illegal but specific behaviours are. This is different than what I believe you are implying. In short, monopolies do a number of very harmful things:
n g_for_unregulated_monopolies.
1. Raise prices. (inevitable with SXm)
2. Reduce quantity available at a given price.
3. Eliminate the benefits of competition which are supposed to be things like lower prices, greater selection.
Most people won't or don't understand the graph, but it's clear consumers are harmed. The little yellow triangle says so: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly#Price_setti
I urge you to examine the issue carefully.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
We now have another monopoly with little chance of any kind of alternative as the barrier to entry is so high.
In both a literal and figurative sense.
Table-ized A.I.
I hope that they retain the XM name. It's fitting.
[%] Cingular Ringtones
AM radio? Where does Clear Channel fit in? They must have a hand in this.
What?
Howard Stern /and/ Oprah?
I fucking quit.
i like how they're covering up the fact that XM is about to flop!
I mean the FCC of course. I wonder if they will stop it.
I don't know if XM has a lifetime subscrition, but I know Sirius does, becasue I have one. Hopefully this deal will still be honored by the new company. I have hopes that a precedence has been set by similiar cases such as the TSR one. For those that don't know at one time early in its history, TSR needed cash and offered a lifetime purchase plan, where for some huge sum of money up front (something like $2000), the purchaser would get everything that TSR published for life. Anyway, when WoTC bought TSR they continued to honored this plan, so hopefully this will count as a precedent.
Anyone have any experience or know of similiar cases and how they turned out?
Read your contract! The "lifetime" part of the subscription only applies to your receiver not you.
Now there's a satellite radio monopoly. That monopoly has competition in terrestrial radio, but that hasn't improved terrestrial radio's quality, because satellite receivers are rare and expensive compared to terrestrial radio.
I wonder what would happen if the satellite network were unbundled from the content, and every media player mobile phone could receive satellite signals.
--
make install -not war
I did read the contract. It applies to 3 recievers, specifically 3 Sirius receivers (consecutivly, not parallel). The question is whether this new company will honor the deal that the old company made. I'm not overly concerend that this reciever will stop working because they switched frequencies/protocols, but if (when) I want (need) to replace it if the contract will be honored.
No price increases. Each service will continue to be $12.95. Of course, with the mandatory bundling, that comes out to $25.90 per month, but it's well worth it because you get both groups of channels.
Now, shut up and be happy....
Yeah, it's weird. I suspect that they will attempt to appease the FCC somehow. Maybe by renting out space on their network?
Back the truck up, kids.
This deal has to get by regulators first. More than one government organization is going to have a problem with these two heavy hitters creating a virtual monopoly in a sparsely-populated communications medium. I have to say I'd be disappointed if this deal passed. Competition is what makes corporations fight for our business. Without it, they've got no incentive to improve.
You're gonna get 15 MORE crappy pop channels, and reduced bandwidth. Just you wait and see.
Just because Mel Karmazin and others want to merge with XM, doesn't mean it's going to happen.
Recall what happened when Dish Network tried to buy DirectTV? It went on for a year, before regulators shut it down-so if I were you, I wouldn't be concerned at this time.
Just because you get modded "insightful" on Slashdot doesn't mean you actually are in real life.
DRM lockin! Awesome! I can't wait to sign up.
/mo for $10, 50 for $15, 75 for $20). As a bonus, you get to know that you're not supporting the MAFIAA with your subscription.
How about eMusic? I use this regularly and am always finding interesting new albums. Everything is DRM-free mp3s and the prices are very reasonable (30
It's a good place to find music. The metal and industrial sections are very good.
I read on the Speex mailing list a XM developer was testing the audio codec
& google uses it for gtalk too and it works for free like beer for everyone
Bandwidth and programming are cheap. Client acquisition costs, administrative staff, offices, insurance, programming development and infrastructure costs are where merged companies find savings. IMHO they'll find savings in reducing overhead, not programming.
I don't pay for the service and I still don't use it.
I drive a ZipCar which provides satellite radio as part of my rental. I'm not sure which service (I think XM). I tried it for a while, but decided that free radio played what I wanted to hear more predictably. It could have been the user interface. The receiver in the ZipCar does not easily store my preferred stations and allow me to skip to the next station if I didn't like the song that was on.
I have Sirius and one of the things that's always bugged me just a little bit is that I can get great NFL coverage on Sirius but zero MLB coverage. Sure, I could buy an XM subscription, but that requires two radios, two bills, and a whole lot of stuff in my car.
With the two merging, the combined service will have nearly all sports covered -- football (college and pro), hockey, Futbol (Soccer) domestic and international, NASCAR, Formula-1, NBA, etc. It will be really nice. No Curling, Underwater Basket Weaving, or Breast Bongos, alas.
BTW, I'm all for the new service to be called "S(e)XM"
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
Yes, FM may have a large library, but what good is it if they have unimaginative program directors who maintain limited playlists?
When FM radio abandoned the wonderful idea of letting on-air deejays play whatever the hell they liked, they lost my interest.
I love my mp3 player, but no matter how big the storage, I know what I've got, even with thousands of songs and shuffle. The beauty of radio is that you can be surprised. I would trade the knowledge that I will like everything I'm going to hear for the excitement of the occasional wonderful obscurity or cut from a musician I've never heard before.
Before I grew a wife and daughter, I used to go to sleep with the local "underground"(!) FM station, NPR (when they still played music) or one of the TWO (!) classical stations we used to have here in Chicago playing softly. Once in a while I'd be wakened from a sound, stoned sleep because some stunning, unexpected bit of beauty was coming over the airwaves. Those experiences nurtured a lasting, ever-young love of music and of the unexpected. Even after the underground station morphed into a common "adult-oriented rock" format and one of the two great classical stations went out of business (WNIB) and I grew out of my fascination with cannabis, I will still occasionally give the micro-SD that goes into my mp3 (Sandisk) player to a friend onto which to put something he/she likes. The thrill of hearing something fresh and/or surprising gets my head up even better than the weed used to, with the added benefit of not finding empty ice cream or Entenmann's cartons on the coffee table in the morning.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Well, I should have known something was up. A number of channels disappeared a few days back. Including my favorite station 67 which I listened to 90% of the time.
Frankly, my wife never liked the country stations. And that was the one station I listened too so the value of Sirius for me has become pretty low. Maybe they will replace it after the merger. A few other shows I like are on XM. So maybe we'll get those too.
I guess I can only hope...
they'll combine all the great sports programming and both types of subscribers will get it all.
Personally, I signed up for XM because of the NHL programming (and the talk radio channels) but now I'm afraid I'll have to pay MORE just to get what I ORIGINALLY signed up for.
If they pull some sort of tiered pricing scheme for sports programming out of their collective asses, my subscription will be canceled faster than you can say, "Kiss my ass, Oprah and Friends".
Where the hell did you get a 1 MHz channel spacing for FM?
The FM broadcast band I know has a 200 kHz channel spacing, admittedly with certain limitations on the geographic locations of transmitters on adjacent channels, but even if you left half of the allocated channels unused, that's a 400 kHz spacing, not 1 MHz.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
You mention "Fred" which is XM and then you say "If that's what XM is like...". You just made this crap up didn't you?
I wonder if Dish network will carry XM stations (they carry Sirius' music stations now). Also I listen to it a lot at home. chans 6,7,8,9,12,14,15,16,18,21,22 and a few others.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Seriously. Watch CNBC. Someone will say something like that very soon.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
I hate to tell you this, but you are obviously a cultural dead weight, a pathetic member of the slave strata who wouldn't understand true beauty if your life depended upon it.
The very simple fact that you find ANYTHING on major broadcast radio means you are likely also a total idiot with only average intelligence at best.
Enjoy the fact that you are a loser, and you will die forgotten, an embarrassment to the fucked up brats you will undoubtedly spawn to replace yourself.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
Can you think of any more ways to say "higher prices"?
Well, it didn't work so well when one terrestrial company tried to contain the three of them. WNEW had them all at once, and O&A were treated as the little stepbrothers who were slapped with gag orders and so on regarding talking about Howard. I foresee tension in the Force.
Being on satellite radio they should both be able to escalate their disputes, whatever they might be, to whatever level the market will bear. With the FCC, it's more of a somebody has to be dominant thing because they're limited in the level to which their disputes rise. I'd be surprised if any of it were sincere anyway.
For an intelligent though still irreverent radio show, get the podcasts of Penn Jillette's show.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
How hard would it be to build a dual-protocol receiver now that they're merged?
I'm sure you're right, that's exactly what they'll do. The temptation is going to be very strong to get rid of the redundant bandwidth and chipsets in the not too distant future, leaving lots of stranded customers (on the XM side, I'd guess) before too long. Maybe they'll do something for them, but if it's integrated into the car that's going to be interesting.
I've been avoiding the whole area for this reason - I'd still rather see them go MPEG-4 or something, but a defacto standard is at least better than no standard.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Really? My life does not revolve around finding new music and programming it into my iPod. I listen to Sat Radio so I don't have to do that. Plus, I get comedy, talk, and a lot of other programming that have no or less ads.
You've got two things here that aren't necessarily coupled. You could alternately subscribe to a service that made podcasts of pre-determined media that got downloaded to your iPod so you wouldn't have to do it. Slightly larger capacity and residential internet speeds would be helpful to fulfill this model, but that's coming. This would be good for people with your programming preferences who can't get good reception of satellite radio.
Not all of us are tied to our iPods by our nose.
Ah, personal issues with iPods then?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Aren't Sirius and XM the two only providers of satellite radio? I mean, how in the heck is this going to get past anti-trust regulations and the SEC monopoly look-outs?
To my knowledge, Sirius and XM are the only providers of satellite radio. Is DXM the same thing?
Also, if they are not the only providers of satellite radio, then wouldn't the combined market share of the two merged companies put them at risk for anti-trust any monopoly violations?
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Now hold on a damn second. The FCC already said no just a few weeks ago when these rumors started. So what's changed? (read: who got paid?)
& refer=conews&tkr=SIRI:US&sid=alWomkStRxIg
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?id=conewsstory
"On a scale from 1 to 10, people are stupid"
Wow, a comment from the past! Did you write this in October 2004, when Opie and Anthony started out? Then, they had tens of thousands of loyal listeners, who had waited 30 months while they were off the air, paying an extra two dollars a month to listen. They haven't been on the premium tier for a while, and are not only part of XM's regular channel lineup, but have the most popular show on the entire platform.
You sir, are a moron.
Just because they want to merge doesn't mean that it is going to happen. Various departments in the government get the final say on that, and I believe their last opinion on that idea was that it wouldn't happen. So we'll wait and see. Maybe the Bush administration and somehow get this merger through, but I believe that part of the terms for one of the companies involves them not being able to merge. There are a lot of legal hurdles that will have to be surmounted to get this merger to happen.
Went with them because they had the only unit that could easily be fit into a DIN, the Starmate Replay. Neat little unit, too. I can rewind the last forty-four minutes of a station I've listened to, and has notifications for sport teams, and favourite songs/artists that are currently playing on the network. My car has two DIN slots. I didn't want some ungodly bright thing stuck onto my windshield or the dashboard. They may have been a bit cheaper to, I can't remember.
Anyway, I'm happy with the hardware, I'm happy with the service. I don't thing I've even ever listened to Howard Stern. As long as I can continue to use the unit after the merger, and the content more or less remains the same, I'll continute to be happy. Sirius Canada is a separate company anyway.
Karma: Can only be portioned out by the Cosmos.
XM has the better sound quality but Sirius seems to have the better content in many circumstances, in my opinion. For example, XM's metal channel went online-only some time ago, whereas Sirius' Hard Attack is both on the satellite and online has great shows with artist interviews, different sub-genres, etc.
What bugs me is that in the drive to be profitable, I can see the bean counters taking over eventually, marginalizing everything that's great about satellite -- delivering specialized, commercial-free(ish) content... similar to cable or pay TV.
-Stu
I have two cars, one with Sirus and one with XM. I've had the chance to take both on long hauls so I've listened to both Howard and O&A. After listening to both shows for extended periods of time, I don't think there is really any debate. I was a loyal Howard fan but when we began listening to O&A, my loyalties changed. There is just something about O&A that seems real, while Howard is trying to be a persona of his past. Howard's show has become stale to me even with the $500m retirement to satellite and O&A seems to me to be the real future. I still tune in to Howard when I have no choice, but given the choice, its O&A from now on. Personally I would use O&A as leverage to renegotiate a more economical deal with Sterns, but since Sirius is known for making really upside-down bad financial decisions, they will probably let O&A go and watch that segment of terrestrial radio out perform their stale flagship product.