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fongaboo's picture
The Contentious Consumer


Submitted by fongaboo on Tue, 02/20/2007 - 7:08pm.

Sirius and XM have finally anounced their agreement to merge their respective satellite radio services. I've been wishing for this for a while.. sort of..

The satellite radio industry first made the collective mistake of not standardizing the methods of transmitting and receiving digital satellite broadcasts. The FCC didn't do it, I suppose, because they were too busy with Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction. This meant a different proprietary radio for each service. This meant getting two radios if you want to, say.. tune into both NFL and MLB games. Not that I particularly care for spectator sports, no less listening to some one else describe as they spectate, but still..

We thought such lessons were learned 25 years ago in the home video wars, but apparently there are still plenty in industry who still don't understand that battling proprietary formats for any type of media actually STIFLES competition and slows adoption. Case and point is the current HD-DVD/Blu-Ray war.

At least if you bought a Betamax in the 80's, when the dust settled you just had to unplug your unit to make room for a VHS. But up until now, if you were an early adopter of satellite radio, you had a 50/50 shot of having to rip a radio out of your car and install a new one if you eventually ended up with the lame duck unit.

Most, like me, knew better and avoided satellite radio altogether for the meantime. At least that is my theory for Sirius and XM's modest customer numbers. If I'm going to PAY for radio, I better know that it's going to have everything I want on it and that I'm not going to end up with a nice doorstop in a few years.

We had standards for terrestrial radio receivers and even for CATV receivers that everyone supported. How did a standard for satellite radio not arise in a similar fashion? Even if some natural cause of events didn't lead to a standard, why don't the people behind these burgeoning industries realize how crucial it really is to their business? Competition is what happens still to this day on the AM and FM dial: One radio for all content-providers, and if your stuff is not good, I just turn the dial.

So the good news is that the eventual culmination of this corporate merger is the merging of the transmission standards for both services - a reality in which I may actually finding myself partaking in as a customer. This will mean new radios that will be able to receive all satellites. It's not clear to what extent early adopters will still be left behind with their one-system receivers, but XM and Sirius say they plan to begin transmitting some respectively unavailable programming on both services. I'm not really in the know about the architecture of their satellite networks, but I imagine this has to be pretty redundant in terms of transmission equipment, radio spectrum bandwidth and money. My guess is that they will do this for a finite period as a grandfathering period, but ultimately make people get the universally-compatible radios in the future.

Some call it a monopoly. I guess it depends on how you look at it. The most ideal situation for competition would have been a government-created standard for satellite radio with one type of receiver but two or more providers. In that reality, people could get their radio and then choose providers at their discretion. But file that under would-coulda-shoulda. I guess the satellite radio business will specifically be a monopoly in itself, but will have competition in the overal business of radio in the form of terrestrial and online radio. This is similar to the competition between Direct TV and the cable companies; you can still ditch the apple for an orange, so as a consumer you still have some alternative.

But the botom line for me is that satellite radio is no longer an untouchable experiment for me to avoid. Now that I can be assured that I'm not potentially buying into a dying format, I may be on board.

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Critter's picture

Problems on many levels

Submitted by Critter on Wed, 02/21/2007 - 10:15am.

There are problems on many levels.

First, though, let me say that I firmly believe that FCC + Broadcasting = Clusterfuck for all cases where year>1985 or so.

First, there was the AM stereo and AMAX standards, or lack thereof. AMAX offered to give us (relatively) high-fidelity AM broadcasting (not quite up to FM specs, but still pretty good), and there were no fewer than five different standards for AM stereo. Of course, due to licensing issues, you could not put more than one of these in any given radio receiver. Needless to say, these all died.

Next, we find the FCC pushing digital TV. Don't get me wrong, I think digital TV is a great idea. I've been enjoying it via satellite for a lot longer than it has been available over the airwaves.

The Europeans, of course, beat us to it on digital TV. They developed a spec called DVB (Digital Video Broadcasting) and rolled out sub-specs called DVB-T, DVB-S and DVB-C for terrestrial, satellite and cable, respectively.

The US cable companies got it right away and adopted DVB-C as the standard for digital cable.

One US satellite company got it right away and adopted DVB-S as the standard for digital satellite. (In fairness to the other satellite TV service, they were on the air before DVB was finalised and so had to roll their own).

So, DVB-T has some neat advantages that allow (a) two transmitters to operate on the same radio channel as long as they are sending the same content, eliminating the need for fill-in transmitters to have their own channels (e.g. WTEN could be on channel 10 both in Albany AND North Adams, rather than 10 here and 19 there), and (b) is very resilient against interference. Think we could adopt that?

Fuck no.

We had to roll our own spec, one that isn't so interference resilient, that can't really even handle multipath interference well, one that requires repeaters to have their own channels, one that uses a proprietary codec for the audio (though in fairness, the AC3 codec (AKA Dolby Digital) that our spec uses is superior to the MP2 codec used by DVB and some DVB systems have adapted it for some channels)

Next, we have digital radio (non-satellite). Again, Europe beat us to it, using some frequencies in the 174 MHz region for digital broadcasting. Stations get generic channel numbers, rather than being specified by frequency, and one transmitter can carry many stations under a common carrier status. You can tune your radio to any transmitter in your area and then select from the channels it offers. Don't like any of them? Tune to another one.

Now, of course, the frequencies in use there aren't available here and that kills it, right? Wrong. Just move the concept to a different frequency.... like they did in Canada.

Oh, I almost forgot. The European model uses MP3 as the codec, which, as we know, is very widely available. Bitrates soar up to 256kb/s. The sound quality should positively rock.

So what did we do instead? We introduced Hybrid Digital radio. Notice how that acronymises to HD, so deceptively. It is anything but high definition. 96kb/s on FM, 48 on AM, and we use a proprietary codec. Making it worse, broadcasters using this spec have to pay an annual licence fee to iBiquity. That's right, broadcasters don't even own their own equipment any more!

What do we get in exchange for this? The station appears at the same place on the dial as before. Oh.

So realistically, satellite radio is yet another thing that has been messed up by the FCC's failure. On those occasions when they do lead, they so often lead in the wrong direction. I think it is because they are too distracted by.... boobies.

It's the same sort of thinking that has kept us off the metric system. We just have to do things our own way.

--
DRM, Eggs, Sausage and DRM 'asn't got that much DRM in it....

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