I am a Ham Radio guy and this week I had an interesting conversation with a former XM Employee on the Han Radio airwaves. He will remain nameless to protect his identity even though the information he gave me was of his own opinion and not any true intel to what is happening at Sirius XM.
His take was that in the next year you will see all aspects of the XM channels put to rest. The name brand will remain Sirius XM and the content and marketing will shift to live sports, sports talk, and limited commercial music stations of different generes. What's interesting to him though is that some of the genera's will die like the 40's and 50's. I can attest as a heavy listener of the 40's on 4 channel that there is already a change in the programming that indicates it will be gone in the near future as they pipe in different channels like "High Standards" or different Jazz channels. He said they are doing the same thing with the 50's channel.
Anyway... it was an interesting conversation. My thought before talking to him is that he is right. Sirius could really do themselves a lot of favor by putting a strong focus on streaming over the internet as much content as possible like pandora instead of investing in satellites. It was a great thing 10 years ago before the portability of smartphones with internet access and broadband internet being standard in so many homes.
I know for me, I have one of my XM Roady 2's in the house we still use, but I can use the App on my droid for my vehicles and for the office I can use the internet stream. I cancelled 2 of the radio's we had in our vehicles earlier this year.
His take was that in the next year you will see all aspects of the XM channels put to rest. The name brand will remain Sirius XM and the content and marketing will shift to live sports, sports talk, and limited commercial music stations of different generes. What's interesting to him though is that some of the genera's will die like the 40's and 50's. I can attest as a heavy listener of the 40's on 4 channel that there is already a change in the programming that indicates it will be gone in the near future as they pipe in different channels like "High Standards" or different Jazz channels. He said they are doing the same thing with the 50's channel.
Anyway... it was an interesting conversation. My thought before talking to him is that he is right. Sirius could really do themselves a lot of favor by putting a strong focus on streaming over the internet as much content as possible like pandora instead of investing in satellites. It was a great thing 10 years ago before the portability of smartphones with internet access and broadband internet being standard in so many homes.
I know for me, I have one of my XM Roady 2's in the house we still use, but I can use the App on my droid for my vehicles and for the office I can use the internet stream. I cancelled 2 of the radio's we had in our vehicles earlier this year.