T-mobile is coming after AT&T and Verizon. They’ve announced that streaming of music to your T-Mobile cell phone will not count against your cell data limits. This includes a number of popular services including iHeartRadio, Pandora, Spotify, iTunes…
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/06/t-mobile-broadens-uncarrier-ness-with-unlimited-music-iphone-test-drives/
T-Mobile also wants to break the “get a new phone every two years” cycle by selling full price unlocked phones and not locking you into a contract. They’re shaking things up. My AT&T contract is over I think – I almost walked into a T-mobile store the other day to get details of getting a t-mobile SIM and trying their service.
This is the long awaited SiriusXM killer. The issue is the UI. We need a nice in-dash radio that interfaces with the phone via bluetooth to get the streams.
Better still would be an in-dash radio with two hidden car antennas – opposite corners to prevent dropouts- that easily accepts SIM cards.
“They” are puzzled why Bob Pittman doesn’t create an iHeart IPO and use that money to pay down the worst of the $20 billion in debt. He claims iHeart revenue is already “hundreds of millions” of dollars.
There are rumblings that the lenders are getting a little uncomfortable with Pittman, but his contract runs for another 4 years or so. I would expect once the necessary things are in place, Clrar Channel and Cumulus will start promoting the hell out of t-mobile.
And I agree with you. While Sirius XM has taken a big chunk out of Radio’s butt, I think it’s the wrong technology long term. I’ve never had the service in a car, but my understanding is most of the time your reception is coming from low power repeaters on the ground, not directly from the satellites. Putting those on cell phone towers makes a lot of sense. To work reasonably, digital FM needs an aggregator rather than each station having its own antenna. A smart FM digital system could stream on-demand only those stations that someone currently in that cell wants to hear. The flaw to that approach is the FCC would not be needed to issue licenses not would it have jurisdiction over what channels must be carried, what is allowed to be said or advertised, and the SPLC would have a much harder time transcribing all the neo nazi talk radio.
Well, they operate at microwave frequencies and that makes them line of sight and means that leaves and heavy rain can absorb the signal so much that it becomes unusable.
I had read that there were about 600 inner city repeaters for Sirius. They are in places like tunnels and possibly subways. The car tunnels connecting NJ and NY had had repeaters for local AM and FM – I think they were added in the 70s or 80s. If memory servers, cell phone repeaters were added after 9-11.
http://www.head-fi.org/t/113334/ok-quick-question-for-those-that-drive-the-lincoln-tunnel
Interesting about Sirius/XM. I have had it in my vehicle for over two years now. I travel to densely populated areas as well as very remote places in the mountains (think “Deliverance”) and I have never had a problem with reception. The signal loss is under bridges and overpasses where there is a stop sign or some other item and drive-through car washes. The one thing I can relate is that there is about a 5 to 10 second buffer built into my receiver unit so that you don’t get an interruption passing under things in the normal course of driving. So if it’s the wrong technology, chalk up another wrong choice to me as I am old school and just enjoying “radio” in my car. I like the “no commercials” approach.
Me too. I have been a big fan since it came out. Just saying that now that the country is blanketed with free music streaming via cell phones, why would you need to pay Sirius/XM too? Sure they have specialized channels but even those stream over the internet.
The thing is that Sirius is already on its second set of satellites – the first set are basically useless but available for an emergency as a spare. (They are kept in their slots and pointed in the right direction by computer controlled micro-bursts of compressed gas. After about 10 years, just like a can of hairspray, the can runs out of compressed gas and the electronics are useless.
The satellites are the long term problem, along with the legacy of two incompatible technologies because Sirius and XM were competitors and Sirius didn’t want to walk away from the installed base of XM receivers. The acceptance of satellite radio was based on an understanding it would take 10 years of getting receivers into cars to get critical mass. A large chunk of that $20 a month isn’t going to Howard Stern or ASCAP – it is the revenue share they’re paying GM and other car companies that eats up most of their potential profits. Sirius only still exists because a guy named John Malone stepped in a few hours before the lenders were going to seize the company. Mel was subsequently forced out by John Malone after he took control of the company.
The other big problem with satellite distribution is that Sirius and XM own only a limited amount of bandwidth. They have improved the compression technology and things like cutting back on the frequency response on some channels – but they are locked into the capabilities of the existing radio receivers that are now 10 years old or more.
What is going to replace Sirius XM eventually is entertainment consoles built into the car using 4G data access. What Sirius is able to do is severely constrained by what they can cram into one satellite signal. IP-based streaming direct to your car does not have that constraint. For most people, most of the time – cellular data is available. There may be places in the deserts of Arizona without cellular service, but those islands are shrinking and that would not cause issues for most people.
The new entertainment consoles more resemble an iPad than radio. They are agnostic as to what the source of the audio is. As entertainment evolves, adding something new to your car “radio” will just be a matter of downloading a new app – just as you do on your cell phone.
A huge advantage from the content end is that your car knows exactly where you are and the history of your listening patterns and the things that you buy. That means with a few commercials per hour, advertisers can as effectively get your attention as playing 15 minutes of scattershot commercials that cause you to change the channel. Sirius XM cannot do that.
This seems to be a difficult concept in America today, but the world is not all about “you”. If you take my observations about Sirius as a personal attack on your buying decisions, I suggest you re-examine your life and / or find another website more suited to your personality (Brian)
There are two main paths with the 4G streams. The first is the multicast, similar to the stations on SRG today where one stream can be shared by mufti-destinations (cars).
I don’t think that is likely because it really is all about “me”. I will get my own personal broadcast with tailored commercials based on my GPS position and my usual traffic routes. The device will notice which commercials I skip and replace them with commercials I don’t skip. Think browser-infected adware.
The “me” comment was not meant for you unless you think it was.
Does sirius xm not see this writing on the wall?
Why would they not ditch the satellites in the future for the new 4g wireless internet in your car?
That would be AMAZING to be able to listen to ANYTHING you want in your car? Or stream a premium show you like instead of those shitty terrestrial stations?
Is this a pride thing art?
Enjoy this classic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQkpes3dgzg lol
I’d like to retract that last youtube and replace it with this one. Enjoy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3amIb0iwZQ
Sirius/XM is locked into their business model with the huge investment of all those in car radios. This is long term thinking – the current service will be there for a long time unless they were to lose the satellites – as CC points out, they have spares sitting there. But it does leave them vulnerable to a Chinese “accident” that has already happened once.
If I were to look at my crystal ball, 10 years from now, they will have chosen either the Sirius or XM technology, and phase out the one satellite type and repurpose that bandwidth for terrestrial delivered programming via similar technology to what the Cell companies will try to do – maybe even sell them the allocation. But any of that depends on the FCC agreeing to it as they were specifically handed out to provide the type of service they do today.
I personally think it was a huge mistake to allow the two to combine, ending the competition. If they had both wound up in bankruptcy and had to cut back spending on talent, so be it.
I just checked and here is what I found:
SIRIUS FREQ: 2320.0 to 2332.5 MHz
XM FREQ: 2332.5 to 2345.0 MHZ
Of course, SiriusXM has a monopoly on those frequencies in North America. They are close to the new cell phone frequencies that have many narrow bands, including these too on either side of the SiriusXM spectrum: 2,110–2,155 MhX and 2,496–2,690 (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_frequencies )
So could SiriusXM use part of their allocation for terrestrial multi-cast? Sure, but I think it would be better for them to partner with the cell phone companies just as T-mobile is doing with others.
Wireless IP multicast is the end game. It would not surprise me if that’s what this T-Mobile announcement is telegraphing.
LTE bandwidth is a scarce resource. Unicast streaming is also the wrong long term answer. As adoption picks up, efficiency plummets. Let’s create a hypothetical. WBT is still a significant station in Charlotte. The metro area has about 3 million residents. Let’s guess there are 100,000 commuters during morning drive and 2% are listening to WBT (streaming eventually). We have 2000 hypothetical streamers – let’s guess there are 50 cell phone sites. At one time, an average of 40 listeners are streaming the same station at the same place at the same time. One copy of a multicast stream could feed all 40 or 40,000 listeners with a single copy of the stream. That’s essentially the experiment that happened this year’s Super Bowl
http://www.verizonwireless.com/news/article/2014/02/keeping-customers-connected-super-bowl-xlviii.html
But multicast only make sense in an audience with a large number of simultaneous listeners. If I’m listening to KF I from Los Angeles as I’m driving to work in Charlotte, there is no benefit to multicast – and there is a waste if nobody in Charlotte this listening to KFI at the moment.
The entire FM broadcast band is 20 MHz of spectrum. With essentially the same amount of spectrum, digital multiplexing and heavy compression permit 100s of channels instead of the couple dozen stations possible with analog FM or its bastard stepchild the IBOC HDRadio disaster.
The NAB perspective is that they can’t even survive as it is, and any new competition that fragments their audience even more will put them out of business and endanger national security. The NAB predates the FCC – they designed the FCC and the regulatory structure to protect their government monopoly.
Sirius is limited by that limited spectrum and government interference in their programming decisions. Direct to the vehicle won’t have those constraints.