5 Responses

1. Shaun Eli says:

   March 26, 2007 at 3:19 pm

   Satellite radio competes with iPods?That’s like saying that Exxon competes with McDonald’s, because if I ride my bike instead of driving I’ll have to eat more to replace the extra calories I burned.Let me ask you this– how much are XM and Sirius paying you now for your content? Do you think they’ll be paying you more when they’re not competing for content to fill their many comedy channels?

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2. Brian McKim & Traci Skene says:

   March 26, 2007 at 3:47 pm

   Shaun Eli writes:“Satellite radio competes with iPods?“That’s like saying that Exxon competes with McDonald’s, because if I ride my bike instead of driving I’ll have to eat more to replace the extra calories I burned.”To which we reply:Huh?And then we reply further:iPods and terrestrial radio do indeed compete with XM and Sirius. Old-timers like us tend to see vast differences between the technologies– XM comes to our ear via the satellite in the sky, through a tiny radio in our hand or in our dashboard. But iPods take the content off of our HD on the computer. And regular radio is beamed to a box in the car or on the shelf at work.The young ‘uns make no distinctions– to them, it’s all just content, streaming at them from a dozen directions, and they get where they can, how they can. They don’t know what a vinyl record does. And pretty soon, they won’t know what a CD is, as sales of those kooky silver plastic discs are plummetting as we speak.We suspect that you are loath to concede this point to Karmazin out of some distaste for him or for satellite radio in general. Shaun Eli further asks:“Let me ask you this– how much are XM and Sirius paying you now for your content? Do you think they’ll be paying you more when they’re not competing for content to fill their many comedy channels?”To which we reply:XM is currently paying us zero for the content we supplied to them. We sent it along knowing the terms of the deal. We have our reasons.We neglected to supply any to Sirius. Never got around to it.Across the two companies there are about five or six channels that offer standup to about 12 to 15 million subscribers.In the brave new world of the satrad “monopoly,” there will probably be four or five channels, for a net loss of one or two channels… maybe.If the two are not allowed to wed, there is every chance that neither company will survive. So we suspect that, if the merger is squashed, the number of satellite companies offering standup will be… let’s see if our math is correct… none… offered to zero subscribers.“Monopolies” are not always bad things. “Competition” is often hard to define or identify or quantify.If XM and Sirius merge to form a supposed monopoly, we’re a-okay with that.

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3. Shaun Eli says:

   March 26, 2007 at 4:35 pm

   It’s a basic tenet of fighting anti-trust regulations to spread the net as wide as possible and deny being a monopoly by claiming everybody possible as a competitor.Of course satellite radio competes with other media, just like The Simpsons competes with the Al Franken book that I haven’t gotten around to reading yet. Both compete for my entertainment time and attention. And yes, there are differences, just like there are differences between an MP3 player and a radio. For instance I can listen to my MP3 player on the train but NOT in the car (can’t wear headphones while driving and there’s no easy way to plug it into my car’s sound system).My point was that while everyone else is looking at competition from the point of view of the customer, I was looking at competition from the point of view of the supplier of content.Sure, if they don’t merge they might go out of business. Or ONE of them might go out of business and the survivor may thrive. Or they both may survive anyway, when they have more subscribers and don’t have to keep spending zillions to buy more subscribers.And yes, I too have my reasons for supplying content to one of them, and like you I haven’t gotten around to contacting the other.

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4. ChrisO says:

   March 27, 2007 at 2:37 am

   You seem to be backing up your argument with a rather large assumption. Both services will go out of business? Really? So a few years from now we’ll all remember nostalgically when there used to be satellite radio, but it no longer exists because XM and Sirius went out of business? I think good arguments can be made for more or less regulation of this merger, but allowing the merger because otherwise everyone might go out of business is just silly. What happened to the conservative notion of letting free market forces rule?I also agree that competition is defiend as broadly as possible in these cases. Any entertainment entity can point to a broad array of potential competitors. Certainly things like iPods change the shape of how entertainment is delivered, but that’s always been an ongoing process. From 1964 to now, we’ve seen the advent of stellite television and radio, CDs, MP3 and computers.Over a similar time frame, from 1920 to 1960, people went from having only silent pictures, to talkies, technicolor film, radio, television and color television, not to mention the air conditioning that dramatically increaed attendance at movie theaters and other entertainment venues. I’d argue that folks living during that 40 year period experienced a more dramatic information boom than the young people you point to today.

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5. Brian McKim & Traci Skene says:

   March 27, 2007 at 3:11 am

   Chris O writes:“You seem to be backing up your argument with a rather large assumption. Both services will go out of business? Really? […]I think good arguments can be made for more or less regulation of this merger, but allowing the merger because otherwise everyone might go out of business is just silly. What happened to the conservative notion of letting free market forces rule?”To which we reply:Indeed, why not let free markets rule… and let the two companies pool their resources and subscribers to form one entity?Is the specter of (a perhaps outmoded notion of a) monopoly so terrifying that it might not be a bad idea to allow a merger?If you’ve been following along at home, you’d know that the two companies are spending giant gobs of cash, but that, at the current rate of burn, both are forecast to go out of business in the not too distant future. It wouldn’t be unprecedented– two startups, both convinced that their models are sound, neither willing to flinch, both go belly up.Has anyone come up with any good reason why these combination of these two outfits would cause irreparable damage to the content provider landscape? Indeed, isn’t it easier to concoct a scenario where the continued survival of satellite radio (in the form of an XM/Sirius hybrid) might have mulitiple positive effects on the scene, with multiple positive benefits to the consumer?

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