The rollout of satellite radio began in 2001, and cost BILLIONS of dollars. In fact the startup costs are still keeping satellite from profitability. It costs satellite providers about SIXTY DOLLARS PER LISTENER in advertising!
The rollout of HD (officially...the infrastructure has been being put in place for several years) began last year. Rollout costs of HD radio are minor in comparison. Terrestrial radio is already profitable (hugely so in many cases). Penetration is virtually universal. Acquisition costs per listener are tiny. BUT, and this is a huge but, radio has done an incredibly horrible job so far of marketing the new technology. No big deal, as the biggest names are just entering the arena. The announcement that Wal Mart would sell HD is only a couple of months old. WE DON'T KNOW YET WHAT THEY WILL CARRY, or where. They SAID they'd carry it in virtually all of their stores. We'll know this fall/winter if that turned out to be true. I think the Sony radio might be a much better fit to "Wally World" than anything (for the home) that's come out thusfar. Of course we won't really know much about "how it's doing" until all market sectors (car, home, portable, "walkman-type") have had time to settle in. There still aren't any portables...won't be till (earliest) late this year, or (more likely) early next.
Will HD succeed? If you believe that you know the answer to that, you're delusional. It's unknowable by a rational person! There are no facts yet upon which to base a judgement. What I THINK is that YES IT WILL if radio gets it's act together and markets it well. But NO IT WON'T if they don't. People didn't just suddenly say "gee, I've gotta' get me one of those little music players, Apple please make us one!" Apple created the player, then sold us on the idea that "Cool people want these. The coolest people HAVE them!" That's the way new technology comes about. Nobody was begging for the personal computer...even decades after it was introduced. It took a few "power apps" (easy to use graphical user interfaces, office suites which made worke asier, the world wide web, digital photography, digital music, broadband, etc.) to take it from "tech toy" to something useful. What are HD's "power apps"? So far, multicasting. But in time, much more. Electronic paging, conditional access for narrow niche markets, perhaps surround sound (although I couldn't care less about that), giving voices to minorities (not just racial and ethnic, but political, religious, and others) who wouldn't be heard otherwise (where are the liberal voices on talk radio? There are more Democrats than Republicans after all!), and those are just the ones my feeble mind can conjure up. There are lots of others...because unlike analog, digital radio is more than "just audio". It's binary code sent from point a to point b. And THAT can be most anything there's a market for...and will evolve over time.