Word: sirius
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When I bought a new car equipped with Sirius satellite radio, I had no idea how the technology would alter my sense of the passing American landscape. With its clear, unvarying signal, which seems to arrive from a spot beyond the moon, and its vast profusion of music, news and talk shows, the medium places you at the center of everything, even when you're in the middle of nowhere. The problem is that the center of everything is not an actual, inhabitable place but a floating media mirage, an invisible digital bubble of information located somewhere in the fifth...
Karmazin concedes that he didn't foresee the potential of satellite radio and raised doubts about its viability as a business model. Just a week before being named CEO of Sirius, he told a broadcasters' conference in Portugal that while Stern made a "brilliant" deal for himself, "the jury is out on whether or not it is good for anybody else." To the old guard at Sirius, Karmazin certainly seemed like a saboteur. "They thought my agenda was to hold back satellite radio," he says of talks he had with Sirius in 2003 about a link with Viacom. What changed...
Some call Karmazin an opportunist--or, more unkindly, a traitor to the old radio business--but nobody ever called him stupid. His strategy of seeding the Sirius lineup with high-priced stars makes sense if it's going to challenge XM, the market leader. XM's chipsets and audio technology, developed in-house, are a generation ahead of Sirius' hardware. Last fall, XM was first to market an iPod-like portable-radio device. The company in 2004 began serving up traffic data in major urban markets, fed directly to a car's navigation system, a feature that Sirius has announced...
...also has the edge in the automotive sector, the heart of the satellite-radio market. XM generates 50% of customers with new-car sales (Sirius does better in the aftermarket), and XM's financial backers, GM and Honda, offer XM radios as standard equipment in 62 models, selling the tuners in 30% of their new vehicles. Sirius' partners, such as DaimlerChrysler and Ford, are running at a 10% to 15% installation pace, says analyst Lee Westerfield of Harris Nesbitt. All told, he estimates that XM's automotive partners hold a 10-point market-share lead over automakers aligned with Sirius...
...broader challenge for both Sirius and XM, as well as broadcast radio, is to fend off rival audio technologies, from iPods to cell phones that can play MP3s to Internet radio. Consumers like New York City law student Shaina Itkin, 26, say they would love a satellite radio--iPod combo, using the radio to find new music to download. Although there's an iPod dock from TimeTrax for podcasting satellite radio, for now, she says, "my iPod will do." Sprint, meanwhile, launched a radio network this month (see sidebar). And Motorola is testing a service called iRadio that will allow...