03.28.08
Crossover
There were some details posted at Engadget about the consumer fallout over the Sirius/XM merger today; the good news is, the prices aren’t going to go up that much for those folks who might want to listen to both sides of the combined service. The bad news is, “both sides” is a complete and total joke.
According to what got released, subscribers of one service can pay an extra $4 to get the “top 11 selections” from the other service. No choice, no pick-and-choose to reduce redundancy– and worse, no option to get everything of the other service. Oh, sure, you can still get a second, opposite receiver to get everything, but at that point you’re paying twice as much and getting half as much value (owing to redundant stations). Now, granted, I’m willing to believe that there’s only a limited amount of bandwidth that can be used for the channels, so getting everything on one reciever and one service is a little unreasonable– right now. But technology is improving every day, and I’m sure that there are downloadable codecs which can be used to compress the audio further on some channels while maintaining similar quality. Obsolescing recievers isn’t going to happen, but the fact of the matter is that there needs to be a better way to increase channel capacity. Promising a merger of two popular, large sets of channels and delivering virtually none of that content to either side is more than a little deceptive.
It gets better. Part of why I’m psyched for the merger is to get football on my radio; I still follow the Bills and the Browns, but around here if it’s not the Steelers it’s not on TV on Sunday. I bet the Sirius folks would kill to have baseball, too (not to mention the regional weather and traffic– I love that). Problem is, right now, neither side can have both sides’ sports programming. It’s conspicuously absent from the plan details.
(Also, and this is probably just an oversight or I’m missing it, but my favorite XM channel, the trance and progressive The System, isn’t on the XM list in the document. I don’t know if it’s the result of a conflict with Worldspace Satellite Radio, who provide The System to XM, or if it’s just an error, but I’m going to assume that I’ll be losing one of the primary channels I picked XM for over Sirius. XM’s customer support line was as unhelpful as was anticipated. I wouldn’t mind nearly as much if The System went internet-only, but I really doubt it will.)
Overall, I’m just frustrated that something as promising and promised as this could wind up to be more of a nightmare than anyone reasonably expected. I’m hoping that what Engadget has leaked is just a preliminary document, and is outdated, but I’m not holding out much hope.
ANYWAY. I’ve actually managed to procrastinate enough that I’ll be lucky to get even the first scene of the Blueberries second draft done tonight, but I am officially in Writing Mode now. Catch you all on Monday, at the LJ, with the Game Report for March.