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 Originally Posted by freeridstylee
Will Sirius still be in business when the pre comes out?
Liberty Media (most notably, co-investors in DirecTV as well) bailed them out with a long-term loan for their debts due the rest of this year, so they'll be around for the currently foreseeable future. Beyond this year, they have some more debt issues to contend with, but the fact that there was a rather harsh backroom bidding war between Liberty Media and Charlie Ergen (the billionaire that runs and owns a significant share of, you guessed it, Dish Network) means that Mel will most likely have a GOBN (Good Ol' Boys Network) to fall back on in case of more hard times.
Satellite radio isn't going to be profitable in the short-term, or even in the nearer-long-term, but the potential of the medium in the farther-term is too big for the industry to collapse - if Siri-XM fails as a business, rest assured, someone will sweep in to pick up the pieces, either of the entire company, or at the very least, the very valuable SDARS frequency licenses and satellite systems to launch their own system.
Even with the rise of mobile Internet radio, the fact is that one-way satellite broadcast will almost always be more efficient and viable for large-audience dissemination of content - mobile Internet is still too costly for the vast majority of the US (before you say satrad is too, look at the difference - $13 per month for satrad (with even cheaper, more focused plans also available) versus anywhere from $20 to $35 a month for 3G mobile Internet), and is too costly to scale to cover the entire continental US, whereas satellite was designed from day one to cover all areas of the US, rural or developed.
Many rural areas don't even have broadband landline Internet service, so the only way for them to get diverse content of this sort is satrad. And don't neglect the massive royalties the RIAA is placing on Internet radio stations to try and choke the life blood out of them, as well as the suffocating bandwidth charges that quickly sap any remaining profits from successful stations.
Don't get me wrong, Internet radio is a fantastic medium, one I find myself using a lot more in the post-merger days ([in Charlton Heston voice] Damn you, Karmazin!). Pandora, last.fm, and Slacker are all great services - in fact, I actually purchased a Slacker Portable unit, because it offer even better reception than my XM (because it downloads and caches music via WiFi, so no signal is required to listen - great for taking on a walk). But the fact is that despite the growth in popularity of these services, there will be an market position for satrad for many years to come.
Now that I've delved this thread into an irreversible rat-hole, I offer my apologies to the mods. Anyone that is interested in more info on the satellite radio industry should check out Orbitcast.com, XMFan.com, and DigitalRadioCentral.com, because those places are full of people who are uber-fans of these services and know anything and everything about them (similar to SmartPhone Experts members about their respective devices...). Thank you for tolerating my semi-intelligible, off-the-deep-end, sleep-deprivation-and-codeine-cough-syrup-fueled ranting and raving.
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