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Internet Killed the Satellite Radio Star
theodp writes "As Sirius XM faces bankruptcy, Slate's Farhad Manjoo reports that the company has bigger problems than just the end of cheap credit. While it has what seems like a pretty great service — the world's best radio programming for just a small monthly fee — Sirius XM has been eclipsed by something far cheaper and more convenient: the Internet. Load up Pandora or the Public Radio Tuner on your iPhone, and you've got access to a wider stream of music than you'll ever get through satellite. So forget the satellites, the special radios, and the huge customer acquisition costs, advises Manjoo, and instead focus on getting Howard Stern, Oprah, the NFL, and MLB on every Internet-connected device on the market at very low prices."
It was centralized anyway. However, what we need is a mesh network, because otherwise we will lose net neutrality and then you'll be back to having to listen to clearchannel because no other kind of internet radio will work on your mobile internet connection any more. WE MUST DECENTRALIZE.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Only place I use satellite radio...
-1 for masquerading as Bruce Perens.
The family owns four vehicles, and not one of their car stereos has a line-in jack. What workaround has worked for you?
You can get a USB/SD mp3 player that plugs into the lighter socket AND has a line-in which feeds into its FM-transmitter for $15. At least, that's what I paid for mine, shipped, from dealtime I believe.
Most media-playing phones have a way to get a line-out.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
N. P. R.
I got rid of my Sirius a few months ago due to the channel changes from the XM merger, actually. I loved the Sirius metal station. When they merged, they started playing more music from the XM metal station, and it just wasn't as good. The Sirius station played a lot more black and death metal, and a lot less mainstream. There was also an excellent punk station, and (even before the merger) they turned it into some 24/7 AC/DC station. It never came back. I did enjoy Howard Stern, but losing the two music stations I listened to the most was enough to cancel. I'm back to listening to CDs in the car again.
rm -rf
Don't forget the biggest mistake of all: the merger.
Had the merger not occurred, Sirius would be mostly breaking even today. Still operating at a slight loss, but its existence as a going concern would not be in jeopardy. XM, on the other hand, would have gone bankrupt a few months ago, and now be in the hands of new owners. The big debt that's coming due in a few days is *XM* debt. Sirius' original debt wasn't due to cause problems for a few more years.
Mel has destroyed Sirius as a company. He took on XM and its debt load, and achieved nothing besides alienating the customers of both networks for no good reason. The amount of money he saved by consolidating channels was literally pocket change compared to the cost of owning two sets of satellites. I'll give Sirius a pass on Howard for the moment, because he probably WAS worth it to pre-merger Sirius. Remember, before Howard, XM was clearly in #1, and Sirius was the struggling "also-ran". By the end of Year H+1, Sirius was in the lead, and almost making a profit (mostly through creative accounting, but that's still better than XM could do). He wanted XM's bandwidth to launch seatback Barney videos for kids, but ended up gutting the audio quality of both services to add more channels with lower audio fidelity.
The REAL cost savings would have been for Sirius to sell off both of XM's geostationary satellites & broadcast the two data streams formerly handled by them using Sirius' Molniya satellites(*). Rural indoor users would have either needed a proper outdoor antenna with view of the entire sky, or had to move the antenna puck from windowsill to windowsill like Sirius users do, but it would have improved XM's mobile coverage in mountainous areas (where cars were in the shadow of mountains relative to geostationary satellites) and literally saved them hundreds of millions of dollars.
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(*) Sirius has a constellation of 4 satellites in modified Molniya orbits. Basically, one satellite is a spare, and the other 3 are arranged so that at any given moment, one satellite is (more or less) "straight up" (relative to Iowa), one satellite is near the horizon, and one is on the other side of the earth. XM's constellation consisted of two satellites in conventional geostationary orbits over the equator.
Sirius and XM divided their bands into 3 slices, each of which carried the full bitstream. Two slices were broadcast by satellite, and the third slice was broadcast via terrestrial repeaters. I'd be seriously shocked if Sirius' satellites were physically incapable of broadcasting a slice of XM's band, and vice-versa. For one thing, satellite transmitters tend to be designed with fairly open-ended capabilities ANYWAY (they're so expensive to launch, with so much lead time, that the satellite's owner would be financially suicidal to not launch them with a "Plan B" in case the original user falls through. For another, I'm sure XM and Sirius both entertained the prospect that the other's satellites could be knocked out by space debris, solar flare, or some other malfunction... and faced with the prospect of shutting down or paying the other extortionate fees to carry their signal, would grudgingly pay the fees.