Thursday - February 10, 2005
By Macworld staff

Satellite radio company Sirius has confirmed that it discussed the
possibility of adding a digital radio service to the iPod with Apple, but
the company declined the offer.

According to a Sirius spokesman, Apple CEO Steve jobs didn't see a need to
combine the orbital broadcasters functions in the device.
However, although Jobs said he does not currently believe iPod users need
anything other than the ability to download thousands of songs, he said this
might change in the future, especially if satellite radio provided more
interesting content.

Sirius CEO Mel Karmazin told the FT: "Whether you put satellite radio in a
cell phone, video game or MP3 player this could be an enhancement." To back
up his argument he noted Sony's decision to add radio to its Walkman
cassette player.

Analysts have previously suggested that satellite radio is likely to
converge with music players and other portable devices, writes Reuters.

While Satellite radio remains a small market in the US, it is expected to
grow. A survey by JPMorgan found that demand is strong, and predicted
subscribers will increase to 35m by 2010.

Here in the UK of course the focus is on DAB - a completely different
approach to digital radio and one that uses a different codec for
compressing the digital audio.

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