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Re: Monday, February 19, 2007
On satellite radio. 1) Antitrust - For a real market to exist, the hardware can't be locked to the vendor. The switching costs are too high, which means that XM and Sirrius only compete on customer ACQUISITION, not service after the fact. 2) Program quality - 80% of the two offerings are identical. Assuming the cost of programming stays the same (it won't), the quality should go up, not down. 3) Monoculture - That's why everyone has an ipod, not a a radio any longer. It's a healthier monoculture than the wasteland that is terrestrial, 24 flavors of ClearChannel radio. 4) Obsolescence - Good points, but the merger doesn't really change anything, does it? 5) Costs - Neither company is currently profitable are they? That's not very sustainable. I think the REAL critical element is real-time data broadcasting. Radio is dead, but for city dwellers, traffic information sent to an onboard GPS is a HUGELY valuable time-saver. There are responses to this message:
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