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Let's Get Serious..
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. cheap ghdSubmitted by airmax on Mon, 08/30/2010 - 5:32am.
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