As someone who has followed XM from the beginning (as in Winter
2001-2), I can fill in a few holes here.
First, satellite radio effectively missed its window by about five
years. By the time it reached what I'd call the opportunity for
critical mass, the iPod combined with the increased ubiquity of
broadband made people realize there were other ways to get
commercial-free or -limited music.
Add to that the decisions by both radio companies to "Pull A USFL
Trump" and spend money they didn't have to try to get very expensive
property (Sirius: Stern, XM: MLB), they backed themselves into a
corner that only a merger would make sense (and even then, it still
doesn't).
There effectively are limited service levels: you can get a
lower-priced level of service for $10 instead of $13 that focuses only
on music, but SiriusXM makes it kind of hard to get to the page that
tells you about that.
As for the battle over local content, without getting too deep into
the contemptible behavior of the NAB, the original idea for XM (at
least) was to take advantage of their terrestrial repeaters to push
local content, then use a single channel number for that local content
(so you'd always tune to, say, channel 200, and when you were near
Chicago the local repeaters would push Chicago traffic and weather).
I still believe that once you get a taste of satellite radio, you'll
never listen to FM again. The problem lies in the fact that FM is no
longer the competition (as noted above).
I have a library of around 12,000 music tracks, and I feel comfortable
saying I paid for at least 85% of it. The rest is music at least 15
years old (which is my personal cut point where I have absolutely no
qualms about obtaining media via any digital means necessary). As
someone else mentioned on the thread, the primary reason I haven't up
XM is because it plays music I don't own. This is where I even find
Pandora frustrating. Within my library, I have a sublist of about 3800
songs that I use to populate my iPhone. That pool of songs is so wide
and varied that no Pandora channel would work.
As for PG's comment about his daughters and "free" media: this is
where I've always believed that media companies have completely and
permanently screwed the pooch with Gens Y and millennials. Rather than
making their content easily accessible at a reasonable cost, they held
onto it and put such onerous DRM restrictions onto it. There will, in
a digital world, always be PG's daughters who just will not pay, see
no reason to pay, and looks at people like PG as adorable fools
("You're so cute spending your money unnecessarily!") Rather than
wasting time and effort criminalizing and "shutting down" places that
will spring back open seconds later, why not spend that in making
content easier to access for people that don't mind paying for it?
To quote Mr. Letterman: "Well, I fear I've gone too far yet again tonight."
On Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 10:33 PM, Kevin M. <[email protected]> wrote:
> I find it odd that SiriusXM -- offering a bunch of channels for a flat
> fee -- results in a diverse channel lineup whereas the cable/satellite
> TV industry does the same thing with the exact opposite result. Yet
> cable TV prospers while satellite radio fails.
>
> http://www.tvornottv.net/2011/04/10/via-satellite/
>
> --
> Kevin M. (RPCV)
>
> --
> TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People!
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