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SiriusXM Fights to Dominate the Dashboard of the Connected Car

There are lots of other channels that weren't mentioned either.

Id' suggest that they're fighting to maintain status quo in the dashboard. That's the best situation they can get.
 
Theater of My Mind said:
I don't know how anyone can stand to listen to any of them. The sound quality is atrocious.
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The average Joe has a tin ear. That has been proven time and time again. Nobody's trying to program radio -- OTA, satellite or internet -- for audiophiles. There just aren't enough of them to matter, especially in the money demos.
 
Theater of My Mind said:
I don't know how anyone can stand to listen to any of them.
The sound quality is atrocious.
Click to expand...
Subscription radio only needs to have audio quality that is good enough to overcome the shortcomings of commercial radio: fading, multipath, co-channel interference, disruptive non-program material, music that is edited by people who do not listen to it by government mandate, or restricted to only the most popular formats.

I always thought it was absurd that anyone would pay for SCA service...now THERE is some pretty bad audio, yet a key reason that the commission chose our multiplex analogue stereo system was the promise of additional "hidden" audio channels.
 
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TheBigA said:
The funny thing is when they launched satellite radio, they marketed it as "CD quality." Not any more.
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The original game plan for XM was 35 music channels. Period. The audio would have been fantastic. But then reality set in: Content is king, and XM -- joined after a year by a competitor, Sirius -- eventually launched with more than 35 music channels, but also a bunch of news, talk and sports channels along with simulcasts of TV audio. Then came the sports play-by-play deals, the Canadian channels, the FCC-mandated minority set-aside channels, the traffic channels, bandwidth set aside for geonavigation and the huge flop known as Backseat TV. That's why the audio sounds the way it does today. A smoke-and-mirrors technology known as hierarchical modulation allows even more channels to be squeezed into the limited bandwidth, but that only hurts audio quality more.

But again, that doesn't matter to John Q. Listener, tooling along in the noisy front seat of his 12-year-old car with worn shocks and a bad muffler. So long as he can tell that it's "Free Bird" playing and not "Uptown Funk," the audio quality is perfectly fine.

PS -- Yes, audio quality played a big part in the exodus from AM to FM, but those listeners weren't leaving for audiophile-quality audio, they were leaving for punched-up, too-bright, ultra-compressed FM audio, with the music pitched higher and faster for good measure. Better than AM, for sure, but nobody would ever call it high quality. But that's OK, because nobody cares.
 
If they would only get rid of all those sports channels...just look at the list.
Perhaps, they will do something when their two networks are eventually merged into one:
currently, they are duplicating most of their channels onto two networks,
the old Sirius, and the old XM.
 
CTListener said:
PS -- Yes, audio quality played a big part in the exodus from AM to FM, but those listeners...were leaving for punched-up, too-bright, ultra-compressed FM audio, with the music pitched higher and faster for good measure.
Click to expand...
Not originally.
Many of us remember when SXM sounded better than it does.
Fewer of us remember when FM sounded better than it does...and AM
 
CTListener said:
That would be a deal breaker for an awful lot of subscribers. Including me.
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This is one of the problems when you're a subscriber-based service. You have to keep adding services to attract new subscribers. That's why it could never operate with only 35 channels.
 
TheBigA said:
This is one of the problems when you're a subscriber-based service. You have to keep adding services to attract new subscribers. That's why it could never operate with only 35 channels.
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Yep, and that's why when a channel is dropped, it's almost always one that aimed at too narrow a niche. One of the classical channels was killed off, the folk music channel was relegated to Internet-only, channels devoted to Latin jazz, world music and novelty tunes were early casualties. The trend with the talk channels is lowering the bar. Book Radio, an audiobook channel, was replaced by Rural Radio, an RFD-TV service that broadcasts programming including live bull riding events. Sirius XMPR, a mishmash of intellectually stimulating public radio programs, was rebranded as Insight, a mishmash of snark aimed at politics and pop culture. OutQ, aimed at LGBT listeners and focusing on a variety of topics, has been replaced by Radio Andy, featuring Andy Cohen of Bravo, who focuses entirely on entertainment and pop culture as if that's all gay people could possibly care about. But then, that's to be expected, given that Liberty Media -- the fine folks who dumbed down the Discovery Channel -- is SXM's majority stockholder.

Anyway, willingly forgoing the games of an entire pro league or college conference, or eliminating sports talk, is not even a possibility. They'll only disappear if the originators of the programming decide to exclude satellite radio from their plans. So far, they all seem happy with the arrangement.
 
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TheBigA said:
That's why it could never operate with only 35 channels.
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Quantity pushes quality out the door.
The same thing happened on the DAB bouquets in Europe and will happen with HD radio and HDTV.

I really wish the NAB had not been able to pressure the commission
into disallowing local content on terrestrial repeaters.
For example, if New York is playing against Miami,
the game should only be taking up terrestrial bandwidth in those two markets.
Spanish content in Boise, Portland, and Des Moines?
Why, why, and why, and for whom, whom, and whom?

I almost forgot to mention the traffic and weather channels.
They should only be on terrestrial repeaters...disallowed.
 
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ai4i said:
Quantity pushes quality out the door.
The same thing happened on the DAB bouquets in Europe and will happen with HD radio and HDTV.

I really wish the NAB had not been able to pressure the commission
into disallowing local content on terrestrial repeaters.
For example, if New York is playing against Miami,
the game should only be taking up terrestrial bandwidth in those two markets.
Click to expand...

Who would listen? People in New York and Miami would either be watching the game on TV or listening on their local radio affiliate -- which, if it's on FM (as is the trend), would be a much more enjoyable listen than SXM, which really squeezes the bitrate for sports. The whole idea of having every game on everywhere is to satisfy the out-of-market fans and the gamblers and fantasy sports players who want to have every game at their fingertips, as well as super-serving the sports junkies who just like to listen to any game.

Another thing to consider: If you're in Miami and the only source of SXM you have is your local repeater (view of southern sky blocked), you will not be getting all the channels you're paying for if all those other NFL (MLB, NBA, NHL) games are satellite-only.
 
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CTListener said:
Who would listen?
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I believe that most listeners are only interested in their home teams,
and very few travel enough to mean anything serious.
Also, the sports audio would be much better.

As for the traffic and weather, that would be a whole new game:
high quality audio for the top two hundred or more markets.
Then add local news, and the W "CB & IN" S's would be challenged.
 
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I can tell you this. I was a satellite radio subscriber since the beginning before finally letting my subscription lapse last year. But I re-upped through a promo deal in November since I was taking a long road trip at Thanksgiving.

I barely listened to it on the trip. The channels I cared about were playing stuff I *didn't* care about, the music sounded like it was being played through an empty paper towel tube and Stern was in best-of repeats.

I ended up firing up my smartphone and listened to Spotify and Amazon Prime for most of the trip, combined with some local FM around my destination.

It's now February and I've still barely listened to it. Their promo, cheap as it was for 5 months, is not winning me back. Hey, it's not 2002 any more. The music subscription services give me way more of what I want and they sound way better. I still admire Stern but I don't have a second SXM receiver in the house to listen to him during my morning routine, they want more money for that so forget it.

My unintended conclusion -- SXM's business model has no future, especially at the rates they charge and the infuriating "royalty fee" they tack on.
 
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