Sprint customers get Sirius via cellphone

With Applemania sweeping the country of late, some important stories have unfortunately slipped through the cracks. These are stories of hope, stories of dreams, stories of Sprint's Sirius-over-PCS rollout. That's right, the long-awaited prodigal son of the Sprint-Sirius alliance came kicking and screaming into the world today, with 20 channels of satellite cellular radio for joyous Vision subscribers. The offerings here are mostly standard fare, with a good mix of rock, pop, rap, and country-western. As a bonus, one feed will be dedicated to artist interviews and special performances. Here's to hoping they'll broadcast Britney Spears's delivery room antics live and unedited.

[Rob @ Dec 19th 2005 2:37AM]

SIGN ME UP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Nick @ Dec 19th 2005 2:37AM]

Boring...smartphone and pocketpc phone users have had access to XM for months now. Sirius is really starting to be the AMD to XM's Intel.

Kudos to engadget for bringing us the news though.

[kspaz @ Dec 19th 2005 2:37AM]

i wonder what the specs will be for the compressed streaming digital files? sampling rate of 44.1kHz or that bottom of the barrel 32kHz ?
what about compression format?

from my research on the net:
Sirius currently uses Sirius Radio system which uses the proprietary PAC codec from Lucent.
while its competitor XM Radio became the first commercial system to deploy aacPlus (a core profile for MPEG-4 audio called �High-Efficiency AAC.�)

MPEG-4 aacPlus delivers CD-quality stereo at 48Kb/s and 5.1 surround sound at 128Kb/s. This level of efficiency is ideal for Internet content delivery and fundamentally enables new applications in the markets of mobile and digital broadcasting.

aacPlus was also selected by the Digital Radio Mondialeconsortium as part of the standard for Shortwave and AM digital radio.


maybe we will see cellphones within the next 2 years receive digital AM radio transmissions from local cities. digital FM anyone?

screw PTT walkie talkie feature of sprint/nextel, give us radio reception on our cellphones to stay in touch with the world, not the cocoon of low quality compressed MP3s.

[kspaz @ Dec 19th 2005 2:37AM]

give us MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 video
Extended Profile is targeted towards error prone channels (such as mobile communication).

MPEG-4 Standard defines its own Text Stream/Subtitle Format under ISO 14496-17 (MPEG-4 Timed Text). Its text-based (not picture-based as DVD subs), uses UTF-8/16 (including cyrilic, arabic, chinese characters...), allows all sorts of animations (scrolling, colors aso...), allows attaching of fonts and is streamable
MPEG-4 TTXT is already supported in GPAC: mp4box (muxing), Osmo4 (playback).

and phones can have
TTS is an abbreviation of the Text-To-Speech conversion system.
The MPEG-4 TTS can not only synthesize speech according to the input speech with a rule-generated prosody, but also executes several other functions. They are, 1) speech synthesis with the original prosody from the original speech.
Some application areas for MPEG-4 TTS are as follows:
Artificial Story Teller (or Story Teller on Demand)
Synthesized speech output synchronized with Facial Animation (FA)
Speech synthesizer for avatars in various Virtual Reality (VR) applications
Voice News Paper
Dubbing tools for animated pictures
Voice Internet


text is much less data to send from cellphone companies, so it would be in their best interest to have a on-board speech synthsizer to read news, such as a partnering with The New York Times to have your news read to you.

[-=mirko=- @ Dec 19th 2005 2:37AM]

Sirius over Sprint has lead to the censorship of songs on the channels being carried by Sprint.

Check this forum out. As you will see many of us are not happy about this.
http://www.siriusbackstage.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=26584

-=mirko=-

[PauldG @ Dec 19th 2005 2:37AM]

correct me if im wrong, but ur not going to pay $13 a month for this, and ur check will not be made out to Sirius, but to Sprint. Sirius doesn't appear to be the one wanting to censor these streams, it's Sprint. i don't disagree, i just think ur barking up the wrong tree

[Bi ll McLaughlin @ Dec 19th 2005 2:37AM]

How do I get Sirius Radio on my Sprint/Audiovx PPC-6600 PocketPC?

[Bi ll McLaughlin @ Dec 19th 2005 2:37AM]

How do I get Sirius Radio on my Sprint/Audiovox PPC-6600 Pocket PC phone?

[golb @ Dec 19th 2005 2:37AM]

any chance of picking up howard stern starting jan 6th.... hmmmm...