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."

Comments

Re:Oligopoly

[SuperMario666]

Not really, as they will still face competition from traditional radio.

Didn't the FCC already say no?

[MSRedfox]

We already covered the FCC saying no. http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/2 2/2237249

Radio is a coercive monopoly

[tepples]

Not all monopolies are bad. Some result in the best product, even considering price, for the consumer.

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.

Re:Radio is a coercive monopoly

[dgatwood]

Let's be fair. The reasons for those two organizations being against LPFM are very different. Clear Channel doesn't want competition. NPR realizes that the only place where first adjacents are likely to work reliably is in the lower power non-comm band, which means it will disproportionately hurt NPR and its member stations by causing harmful interference. You can't really fault them for that.

The real problem is that the FM band is way too narrow and FM stations use way too wide a band because pure frequency modulation of an analog signal is horribly inefficient. Digital radio hasn't taken off, despite having been proposed over ten years ago, largely due to the fact that there is no incentive for the big radio stations to encourage competition. Similarly, satellite radio hasn't taken off because the bit rate available results in suboptimal sound quality. It uses an omnidirectional antenna, which means that both Siruis and XM share a 50 MHz band, into which they've crammed three hundred digital radio stations.

Humorously, if that same chunk of spectrum were used for traditional FM, assuming you didn't allow second adjacents (and you really shouldn't allow them), you would only have fifty stations in that same chunk of spectrum. However, if you used an uncompressed 16-bit, 48kHz audio signal and modulated it with SSB, even if you couldn't do better than 1 bit per cycle, my quick back-of-a-napkin estimate is that you ought to be able to do it in a less than 120 kHz band (instead of 1 MHz for FM), or about 400 uncompressed channels in that same space---more channels than XM/Sirius, crammed into the same space, and without using lossy compression. So why the heck do we put up with the crap that Sirius/XM are giving us?

I think it boils down to this: people won't stop buying cars if their radio doesn't get any good stations. People will stop buying cell phones if they can't make calls. Therefore, the technology to cram lots of data into narrow bands makes into into cell phones, but not into your crappy car radio. If only the public would vote about radio quality with their dollars when purchasing cars.... Maybe then, we'd have some decent use of our broadcast spectrum. :-)

Re:Guess it was just a matter of time...

[Spritzer]

Both services have commercial-free stations. With XM (my preferred service) the stations actually run by XM are commercial-free. There are plenty of other stations run by outside sources (News, Talk, some music) which have advertising in order to sync properly with their original broadcast source.

Re:Huh?

[Miamicanes]

The majority of content is NOT duplicated. Sirius and XM sound NOTHING alike. Sirius channels sound like normal radio stations, but without commercials. XM channels sound like somebody took a random pile of CDs, shoved them in a changer, and hit the "shuffle" button.

They're about as equivalent as Tylenol, Ibuprofen, and Naproxen sodium. Yeah, they're technically all painkillers and reduce fever, but anyone who's ever had a headache or fever knows that they're definitely NOT all the same. Tylenol utterly sucks compared to the other two, but some people are forced to use it because they can't tolerate them. Ibuprofen rocks for headaches, but sucks for fevers (unless you enjoy having your fever come back every 4-6 hours). Naproxen sodium is a godsend for fevers (breaks once, stays that way), but a complete waste of time for headaches. The same is true of Sirius and XM. Both have slightly different audiences with different expectations -- all of whom are going to be FURIOUS if their network mutates into the other. Even slightly.

Talk to anyone who subscribes to either service. I guarantee that 99% of them will react to the news of a merger with absolute horror at the thought that ${their_network} will get turned into ${other_network}. I *guarantee* that if a merger happens and the music channels from one or the other get dropped to "streamline" and "eliminate redundancy", AT LEAST half of the losing service's carriers will leave in disgust. At the same time, the "winner" network will probably lose at least a quarter of its customers if it changes even slightly to be more like the loser's format was. Ultimately, we'll be stuck with one mediocre provider whose financial position is only slightly better than before, and now has hundreds of thousands of angry and pissed off former customers saying bad things about it and discouraging their friends from subscribing.

This is horrible news for the customers of BOTH services. I expect to see an outpouring of anger from customers of BOTH Sirius AND XM demanding that the FCC NOT allow a merged company to own both frequency bands in a desperate effort to derail the whole merger.

Re:Yeah Capitalism

[TaliesinWI]

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.

Well, which is it? 80's (channel 8), which plays mostly Top 40 hits from that decade with some deep cuts tossed in, or Fred (channel 44), which is "classic alternative", which is going to play New Wave and some punk, mostly from the 80s, but sometimes possibly a bit earlier and possibly reaching into the early 90s, or Ethel, which is going to play newer versions of what Fred plays? There's also a ton of Top 40 format stuff hiding in the 20s, and any of those might trot out an 80s tune now and again.

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.

That's gotta be DirecTV dropping the ball, not XM. I have XM radio, my girlfriend has XM radio, and we both listen to it online, and the artist, song title, and (in online's case) album title is always correct.

We have Dish Network at home, which in addition to keeping its own digital music channels, added Sirius' lineup. I find the jazz lineup a little better on Sirius while my girlfriend likes the alternative lineup on XM a bit better. We picked XM for the car because my Acura came with it standard - something I think is a big limiter in new radio sales - a particular manufacturer signing exclusive deals with one company and not the other, and the retro radio sales just follow along that track. When the lease on my Acura is up, unless I want to pay full price on getting a Sirius subscription, I'm either going to have to buy a model of car with it included or retro an XM radio into it and ignore the Sirius built-in. Why they couldn't stay modular and have either XM or Sirius be an option (like in the Audi/VW world) is beyond me.

I also agree that sat radio's main competition is not from the other company, but from in-car media players. Right now I specifically have not bought an IPod/MP3 player because most of the time I'm listening to music I'm either at home (I have access to CDs) or I'm in the car (and I just turn on my sat radio). If the playlists start getting compromised because they're spending so much money for shock jocks that they can't play a deeper selection of music, then IPods might become a more serious consideration. I spend money for XM every month so I don't have to buy the CDs that I would normally use to make such a varied playlist that I have at my disposal, because at the end of the day an IPod is useless if all you can put on it is the music you've bought and are already sick of, or what's limited to the stuff you can buy on AMS or something similar. Sometimes you just want to get in the car and have music... you don't want to have to skip through a playlist that you put together when you were in an entirely different mood.