Tuesday, November 8, 2011

The Past, Present, and Future of Satellite Radio


       After my brief interview with the UMD student Jennifer Ramirez, I have come to find information Satellite radio. After giving me the gist of what it is, she explains the past, present and future of the top two satellite radio companies including Sirius and XM radio. She explains satellite radio as “a digital radio signal that can be broadcasted through different satellite allowing the radio signal to reach farther areas in comparison to normal radio signals such as AM and FM”.
     To begin, I did a little research and read up on a tweet on Twitter posted by Jennifer stating “Sirius and XM radio merged as one company in February 2007”. After reading that, I decided to catch up with her to ask her a little more about this convergence of the two companies.

What else is there to know? In addition to the formation, subscription price, satellite orbits and number of subscribers, I also learn more about what SiriusXM has to offer. For example, it includes over 140 non interrupted with commercial channels  including music, sports, executive talk, comedy, news, traffic, weather and so much more. Because SiriusXM is subscripted based, some of the FCC rules do not apply that do apply for FM and AM radio broadcasting.         
So where is this going in the future? Well according to another one of Ramirez’s tweets “Sirius XM has now gone 2.0, but with a hefty cost of course, and car companies and Sirius radio work together”. Some auto industries including Nissan, Infiniti, and from my own experience, Honda, are incorporating and equipping Sirius radio for free for the first three months of ownership. This exposes more people annually to SiriusXM so the number of subscribers continues to increase from 2010 with 20million.         

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