"David Eduardo" wrote in message ...

Satellite complements terrrestrial radio, and it will be a long time before
it competes.

Meanwhile, back at the IBOC ranch they are STILL trying to get it
to work and sound good.

It's working and sounding good on about 400 stations now. And there are over
2000 more committed to adding it in the next few years. Factories are
working overtime to produce the new transmitters and antennas, and orders
are backloged.

[...]

XM has 2 million subscribers nationally after just short of three years of
marketing. 2 million is less than the cume of one news station in New York
City. One station has more listeners than all the subscribers to XM. Sirius
is so far behind the dust has settled between them and XM, too.

More
and more channels get added, the choice gets better. Car units, home
units,Computer units. Around the corner are "Walkman" style radios,
armband
holders for XM's Roadie. It will be easy to listen to satellite radio
everywhere.

No, it won't. The satellite signal does not work well on hand held devices
that are in motion, and in office reception is, at best, tricky. I know. I
had 6 units in a building 2 misles form a repeater, and they hardly ever
worked.

Here is whats going away....Multipath distortion,commercials,stupid
DJ's,commercials,stale traffic reports,commercials,dumb contests,
commercials and did I mention commercial

Well, how 'botu this: 95% of Americans listen to land based radio weekly.

[...]

The NAB is a trade association. It does not dictate programming, commercial
policy or music. Market forces do that.

The satellite providers are giving us what we want.

That, then, is why only 1 out of every 150 Americans has it, and evne those
people listen to twice as much land based radio as XM or Sirius?

[...]

Cable stated when the average person had 3 TV choices or less, often with
snow and static. LA has 87 commercial radio choices. There is no comparison.

[...]

Radio today has as much per-person weekly listening as it had the year
before the TV freeze was lifted, when less than 43% of Americans could
receive one TV signal. We have had the transistor, TV, color TV, CATV,
Cable, video games, the Internet, and lots of other entertainment sources.
Radio is very resilient.


From the point of view of a consumer: The only time my wife and I
don't listen to XM radio is when we're in my car, which doesn't have
it yet. When we're in her car, it's pretty much constant XM. We're
remedying my lack of XM as soon as the XM-Direct aftermarket box comes
out. We were able to find an Alpine box for her car. Until I read this
thread, I'd never heard of IBOC. I still don't know what it is. I've
seen and heard many ads for XM and Sirius, though.

Radio is definitely not going away, but it is going satellite. You may
have scores of commercial radio choices in LA, NYC, Chicago, Dallas,
or Miami, but you don't in Knoxville, TN, Overland Park, KS, Portland,
OR, or most of the rest of the country. 95% of the country listens to
land-based radio weekly, but much less than 1% of the country
currently has XM. I don't know what the subscriber figures are for
Sirius, but both are going up. Just about every week at work someone
asks me about XM and ends up getting it. If the weather suddenly
changes or traffic is snarled, I may switch to a local station and
wait through the commercials, hoping that they'll tell me about it.
They do tend to get things a little quicker than the Boston-area XM
traffic and weather channel.

2 million XM subscribers in under 3 years?!? Wow! Cable TV started in
1948 and it didn't hit 2 million subscribers in the U.S. until it had
been around for about 20 years. The creation of HBO in 1972 probably
helped the skyrocket in subscribers to 15 million by the end of the
1970s. I wonder what the flood of cheap XM receivers that's recently
started will do to XM market penetration. Instead of $250 or more for
an XM receiver that the first 2 million subscribers paid, now we're
looking at $50-$100. You, yourself, say that you have or had six XM
receivers at the same time!

People pay for cable and satellite TV, even with all of the
commercials. Stating that satellite radio has no chance against
terrestrial broadcast is starting to have the same level of "wisdom"
that "GET A HORSE!" once had.