Satellite Radio

[SteveDallas]

I'm very happy with XM. If you're dissatisfied with what you're hearing on FM, you'd probably be happy with XM or Sirius. To address your points...

-- Commercials
As of Feb. 1 of this year, XM got rid of commercials on all its music channels. So this is even. (Both services continue to have commercials on news/talk channels, something Sirius didn't go out of their way to point out when they were touting their commercial-free advantage.)

--Equipment selection
I honestly don't know what the current situation is, because I haven't shopped lately. But XM kicked Sirius' butt with the introduction of the SkyFi from Delphi. That was what made the difference for me, because I refused to pay that kind of money for something that was only usable in my car, and only one car at that. Now Sirius has a portable system on the market too, so that part of the market seems to have evened up. As for the dedicated in-car receivers, I dunno.

--Clear Channel
Ehh. I go back & forth on this one. Other than the predominance of Clear Channel talk show hosts, it's unclear to me what influence Clear Channel has that I should worry about. While Clear Channel has a significant investment in XM, it's not a controlling interest, and I'm not sure it's substantially bigger than the stake folks like GM and DirecTV have. (I admit I haven't looked up the numbers.) So far, it looks like more of a case of Clear Channel betting on all the horses in the race than in them trying to smother a competitor in the cradle. I do worry about future directions a little, but I figure I went for a good deal on hardware that Sirius could not match--but they can now, so I can bail to Sirius at a later date if there really start to be problems.


Other things to consider:

Talk shows:
I don't listen to these much, so I don't care. Sirius has made an effort to have a wider diversity of viewpoints.

Sports:
Each company has exclusive sports programming (NASCAR for XM, NFL, NBA, and NHL for Sirius)

Web streaming:
Sirius makes its programming available in streaming audio over the web. (I believe there is not an extra charge for this.)

Rumors:
As vsp says, there are lots of "shock jock" rumors. Who knows what will happen eventually? But I can't see either company will let the other have this market to itself.

There is supposed to be hardware coming out that will receive either Sirius or XM. I have no idea how close it is--probably not close enough to justify waiting.