I think my friend Mark is absolutely right to question whether anyone ought to care about the – snore – merger of XM Radio and Sirius. I’ve questioned the value of satellite radio here before. Paying for limited choice is already an anachronism. How is it going to look when we have 500G iPods that sync wirelessly with the home network, or grab music off the ‘net?
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
While I personally have found satellite radio to be as useless as normal commercial radio (the only station I listen to is CBC Radio 1), I am not sure that a comparison can really be be made between a “push” content model of radio and the “pull” model of an iPod or similar based solution.
Sure, you can store all your music on your iPod, and in the future maybe even retrieve it live from your home PC. But that still requires YOU to download (or rip) that music onto your PC in the first place, to create playlists, to constantly find latest and (arguably) greatest songs, etc. And what about talk radio, is that something you can get off your PC? What about news?
Yes, I know that an argument can be made that “you could get ‘live’ content off the internet”, and sure you can get some of it for free, but I am sure “premium” content, the same Howard Stern for example, will still cost money. However, how is the Internet model really different from satellite radio? The only difference I can see is the method of delivery, and whereas XM/Sirius works now, 500G iPods syncable with Internet radio stations over a flat rate 3G data plan (sure to be more than $12.95 /month) are still a thing of a moderately distant future (2 years?)
Ultimately, whenever you pay for anything, you are paying for a limited choice, a choice of what’s being sold. Whether you pay for it on the Internet or on Satellite I don’t think is that relevant.
I don’t agree with you, Seva.
The internet gives me what I want. Satellite give me what someone else wants. That’s the difference that matters. As to whether choice in one is the same as the other, of course we’re all limited to content that has been produced – no controversy there. But that’s not the issue. There’s already more media out there than anyone could consume in several lifetimes. The issue is who chooses what’s available. One of the main lesson of media in the past few years, IMO, is that push is dead, or at least badly limping. Consumers want control.
And ‘premium’ doesn’t mean what it used to. If it did, XM and Sirius wouldn’t be merging. Theatre operators wouldn’t be having such trouble. And music labels wouldn’t be struggling so much to sell CDs. Of couse people like Howard Stern will still have a market. But with the almost exponential growth of content available through podcasts, there will inevitably be less and less that is distributed through ‘premium’ channels like Satellite. I suspect that this will give satellite less and less to offer that is truly unique. And when that happens ….
As for myself, I haven’t listened to radio news since I started listening to podcasts. I don’t really know why I would. I’m inundated with news – the radio is the last place I would look for it.
As for the work required to get all of this on the iPod, it’s trivial. I have over 100G of content that automatically syncs with the iPod. It took a little time to do this, but as time passes and the average collection grows, that will matter less, and more people will have this. And the value of having that content presented in that way will increase, as social media moves into music (Last.fm, and others). Radio will seem even more anachronistic, then.
And finally, it’s not about whether this is an issue 6 mos, 1 year or 2 years down the road, IMO. Satellite is a 25 year investment, and the internet has profoundly changed media consumption in less than 5. The next 5 will be even more radical. Oh, and I don’t need to get my iPod filled with 3G wireless. I’ll wait for wifi.