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Sirius XM website for FCC set-aside channels

Your only cost is to pay for satellite reception hardware and (Internet backup link?) at the XM Washington or Sirius NY headends - that's it, except for your royalty payment!

It's still BS that these channels are not longer FREE as they were listed by Melvin in the MERGER Agreement with the FCC - liar, liar, pants on fire! These channels were to work on NON-sub radios!
 
Very interesting read.

My idea:

Recorded History. When WBAP in DFW was about to begin simulcasting on 96.7 FM, they did a stunt format called "Reagan Radio." It was nothing but speeches by Ronald Reagan. It was facinating and I found myself listening to it for hours. So expand the idea to include famous speeches by all kinds of people. Add in old recordings of news events and have hosts introduce each bit with some background information on what we're about to hear. There's got to be thousands of hours of this material available.
 
They could dump this stupid idea and bury it.This will only bring more JUNK to the air! Am for example,infomercials,foreign crap and religious stations all over the dial.Its just clouding the airwaves!
 
magicjellybeans said:
They could dump this stupid idea and bury it.This will only bring more JUNK to the air! Am for example,infomercials,foreign crap and religious stations all over the dial.Its just clouding the airwaves!
Click to expand...

They can't dump the idea, no matter how stupid it is. In order to get away with forming a monopoly, Sirius XM had to agree to lease a big chunk of spectrum to outside special interests, and the FCC is holding Karmazin's feet to the fire and telling him to get it done, NOW.
 
From the website:

What Are The Deadlines? Proposals are due by January 7, 2011. The FCC has required that we tell them of our tentative selections on March 2, 2011 and we sign lease agreements by April 17, 2011.

Anybody seen those "tentative selections" or is the FCC keeping them secret? There's been talk on the country and Christian channels of channel eliminations/mergers, so I have a feeling that the leased special-interest channels will appear in April, as scheduled. Looks like the initial round of requests for leased bandwidth was heavy on Godcasters and Asian ethnics.
 
In an ideal XM radio world, one 'set-aside' channel would be 50s-70s pop MOR vocals, one would be traditional TexMex music (like XM92 was), one would be like the old XM "Fine Tuning". I know that Quincy Jones was interested in having a channel, and I could imagine that being of high quality IF he was one of those selected.
I would be bummed if it does turn out to be 'god-casters' (note: Capital G excluded), colon-blow companies, and overmodulated foreign language talk shows.
Either way, it violates the original agreement, which was there was already to have been bandwidth setaside, AND these channels were to be free to all radio owners, include unsubscribed radios, or any unactivated radios (which XM could easily do, as they can with their free previews). Only old Sirius junk would be a problem. Likewise, all Sirius A la Carte radios could carry this junk programming for free, along with all XM rigs.
 
staticradio said:
I would've loved for WWOZ to be on the sats, but there is already Real Jazz.
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WWOZ was one of the earlier FM station to stream their signal over the internet. I remember listening to it in 1997 and really liking the Dixieland jazz. Real Jazz doesn't play a lot of New Orleans music, so WWOZ could be a nice addition as a leased channel.

Again, we have no clear picture of the criteria the FCC is applying. All that's clear is that the entities that lease the bandwidth must be 100% independent of Sirius XM in ownership. Racial or ethnic minority ownership is apparently not a carved-in-stone requirement. Other than that ... who knows? Is a New Orleans jazz programmer a qualified applicant? How about an English/Irish/Scottish music programmer? Or a programmer specializing in environmentalist talk, or automotive talk? Is religious programming acceptable? If so, will the programming be allowed to proselytize or ask listeners to send in "free-will donations" *coughcough*? Is a deeper-playlist version of a mainstream musical format already on Sirius XM acceptable? For that matter, will Sirius XM be allowed to deny leased bandwidth to programming that has the potential to eat into the listenership of an existing channel?


So many questions. Since corporate silence is the rule at SXM, I guess all we can do is wait another month or so and see what happens.
 
JohnnyElectron said:
Less than 3 weeks to go, and not a peep from SiriusXM.
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Not surprising. Nobody with the company wanted to see it happen, hence the foot-dragging. But they had to accept turning over a big chunk of bandwidth in order to have their monopoly pass the sniff test -- it was either accept minority/public interest/whatever programming or no merger.

I wouldn't be surprised if Karmazin and Greenstein have ordered air talent not to talk about the new channels at all; if the outside entities want to publicize their unwanted (by management, and perhaps by listeners) channels, let them buy time on SiriXM-owned bandwidth and advertise. You don't hear the SiriXM hosts mentioning any of the Clear Channel music channels, do you?
 
Rumor has it the bombadier doors open on May 5th with a big realignment of the planet, I mean, channels on XM. Of interest is that when this big rearrangement shows up it will also kill any 'free' old unsubscribed radios, so there will lots of moaning and groaning and gnashing of teeth on May 5th is the big channel re-do is for real as "updating" is the deathknell for their radios! My buddy cried out that the last thing he say was "updating" on his radio, and then the dreaded Channel 1 when he lost his free service after 2 weeks. We'll see what happens.

Nothing "official" from Sirius XM or anything regarding channel lineups in the yet- anybody?
 
The line up of channels is just going to be the same on either an XM or a Sirius radio nothing more nothing less. I was given that info by an unquestionable source.
 
RadioStarOne said:
The line up of channels is just going to be the same on either an XM or a Sirius radio nothing more nothing less. I was given that info by an unquestionable source.
Click to expand...

So what happens to the channels that are now exclusive -- under pre-existing contracts -- to Sirius or XM? The CBC channels on Sirius? The Clear Channel advertising-driven music channels on XM? Major League Baseball play-by-play, which MLB will not allow Sirius to carry, even as part of Best of XM, unless Sirius XM restructures the contract? Do all these obstacles magically fall away on May 5? And what about the special-interest government handout channels? Will all of them be available to subscribers to both services, or will there be a Sirius batch and an XM batch, as has always been assumed? Putting all of them on both services will create additional bandwidth stress and likely doom even more existing music channels.
 
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