Report: Sirius XM preparing to file for bankruptcy
By Ross Miller 
posted February 10th 2009 7:04PM
posted February 10th 2009 7:04PM
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That's what happens when you form conglomerate in today's volatile market. Too bad...
I really feel no remorse here. Sirius should have stayed far away from the crap that was XM.
I just canceled my sirius radio subscription. I mostly listened to howard stern, but it seems like he has increased the amount of advertising and reduced the quality of his content. The actual audio quality sounded like a 32kbit mp3 and was pretty painful compared to FM. I couldn't see paying $15 a month for just greedy ass howard stern. I'm not an audio quality whore, but the signal was so compressed and crappy that a 2 year old could tell the difference between FM and sirius. It seemed like the audio quality decreased as they added more channels. I wish they would get rid of all the crappy channels that have zero listeners and bump up the bandwidth (if possible). If they could get this to sound like 128kbit audio, I might go back. Until then, they can suck it!
This is ridiculous... I jumped on the bandwagon less than 6 months into XM's introduction, solely because I travel quite a bit and rely on not having to scan for local radio stations every 100 miles or so. And here in the South, the abundance of country music and the lack of diversity just makes it more appealing to have XM. If they go through another rate hike, or completely screw up the lineup AGAIN, I'm definitely going to stick with my iPod and audiobooks for the long drives from now on. I've had to contact customer service maybe twice in the entire time I've had the service, and that was just because I changed units from one vehicle to another, or upgraded. I've been pleased with the service up until now, but if they don't get their $#!T in order soon, its not going to be worth it anymore...
On a slighty related note - I wonder if DirecTV will drop their monthly prices a little bit since one of their "included extras" are some XM stations?
1st, I wanted to point this out... from the previous story back in November about the merger, one of the lowest ranked comments was,
"kjb434 @ Nov 12th 2008 1:24PM
Either way it will go out of business in about 2 years. Maybe earlier!
It was failed business model. They still have not made any money."
Damn. Anyone wanna go back and flip that one from lowest rank to highest?? lol. (And no, I am not kjb... I just thought it was funny).
2nd, I was on Sirius like within the 1st month of Stern's entry. I had it just for Stern and nothing else. I absolutely HATE radio. I HATE listening to what some schmuck wants to play. Music radio is stupid in this day and age of PMPs. I hate terrestrial radio w/ it's god awful corporate music, the classic rock stations who seem to only have Freebird, Money and Stairway to Heaven, and all the ads and crappy DJs. I hate satellite radio because the music isn't much better than what you're getting on terrestrial.
The ONLY reason to have satellite radio is for talk radio & sports, not music. But even Stern alone couldn't keep me interested. I realized I was paying $15 a month to listen to one hour a day. (30 min to work, 30 min back from work). At the time, there wasn't a portable Sirius or one w/ 'dvr' like function, I just found it to be a huge waste and cancelled. Again, this was YEARS ago.
Now that they have true portable radios (you gadget geeks should know, but in case you dont... the first 'portable' players weren't really portable. You just programmed it to record some material and then you could take it with you... but if you wanted to hear something 'live', you needed to dock it). But w/ live and portable, I was considering coming back... again, just for Stern. But after reading this... ugh, maybe not then.
I don't think either company thought outside the box enough. They needed more specials and exclusives... like more live concert broadcasts or some form of entertainment outside of music and talk. If they had offered something more unique, I think more people would be interested.
They needed to make it sound better than a fart in a tin can. Instead of improving the sound and making it a compelling service, it's relegated to dying niche marketshare.
what a shame, and i just started liking mine. :/
That's really too bad, I had no problem paying $10/mo for commercial free radio that worked in the mountains.
Perhaps if they hadn't spent nearly half a billion dollars on Howard Stern they would have enough money to survive, those morons asked for it, they deserve what's coming to them, plus, merging with XM was a waste of time, we don't get any more stations as we did before, and instead of adding good stuff they just change everything they had before and made it worse.
Get the "Tuner" app for your iPhone and stream any internet radio station over 3G. It sounds way better than satellite radio anyway. And many more stations, as we all know :)
I spend 1.5 hrs / day commuting to and from work. I have an annual subscription with XM for $79.99. $6.50/mo. or