Former “Republican” aide to former Republican (and deceased) US Senator Arlen Specter has announced he is leaving WPHT in Philadelphia and his syndication deal with Dial Global.
You may remember that this “Republican Conservative” twice endorsed and voted for Barack Obama. The bankers dropped the hammer on Dial Global a few days ago – don’t know if this is related.
Where is he headed? To join SiriusXM where he will appear on the “non partisan” POTUS channel
…”where he will appear on the “non partisan” POTUS channel.”
But, But, he is NOT ‘non-Partisan’. SmerCONish is a flaming lib, pretending to be a ‘moderate’ . I would hate to pay for XM and get that Do-Dah !
Heck you might as well have Diane Feinswine spouting tripe, at least you know you are going to get tripe.
Parrott
Art- Are we seeing a trend here where SiriusXM is hiring its own talkers rather than pay networks such as Global and Fox Talk?
Parrott – I know SiriusXM has directly hired talkers like Mike Church. Based on your postings, I think you might like his show and some of his parody songs such as these example
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLAg8a0vCZQ
and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Up1GujDyeJY
Sirius is so far away from saturation that they should be pouring all their money into developing programming. Adding more customers has minimal incremental costs – the satellites and ground stations are a fixed cost. They have something like 23 million people paying $20 a month. Music royalties is a big expense and I believe is based on a percentage of revenues. If they can adapt their technology to offer talk without music at a lower price, they can shift more toward talk and be able to lean harder on SoundExchange to get a better deal. Since I don’t commute, don’t listen to music and don’t have Sirius on the car, I don’t know how important their music channels are. A few years ago, I was reading comments like it’s all run by computers, and the same list of songs over and over.
Terrestrial stations have to mostly pin their hopes on local hosts during morning drive. In the evening, people could care less about traffic and weather. In big cities with long commutes, local all news still seems viable – in medium size markets, not so much. A good national show beats a boring local show for most people.
Rush so far is sticking to “I go home with the one that brung me to the dance”. If Rush is pushed away from terrestrial radio or decides he’s had enough boycotts, each million subscribers he adds for Sirius would add around $250 million a year in gross revenue. Programming and content is less than 10% of subscriber revenue. They could easily pay him $25 million a year per million subscribers he adds. His current contract (probably wildly inflated) is for $50 million a year.
I could see Sirius making a pitch to acquire Dial Global or at least part if it.
Netflix, cable TV and Sirius have proven people will pay for content. Newspapers are also seeing that now.
The more radio loads up the show clock with exaggerated investment schemes, blue pills to make you a real man, Autism and “your children are gonna die from some terrible disease” government PSAs, the faster stations funding by advertisers are speeding up the process of chasing the audience away.
The in between is podcasting – free or subscription content that is not live – and requires no FCC license to distribute.
How would “radio” content evolve when listeners have a fast forward button?
Many of the XM subscribers were unhappy with the Sirius takeover. Most of us felt that Sirius had inferior programming and narrower playlists and overpaid the people that talk between the songs. For example, the 80s channel on Sirius has all the MTV VJs from the 80s. XM had talented people, but generally people that had no prior national exposure. The playlists are do seem narrower on Sirius,.
I agree they should be developing their own content, where we seem to disagree is whether they have been over paying for it.
XM had and Sirius continues to have the Bob Dylan hour. They also have the Tom Petty radio hour. These shows are and there may be a few others now, are where famous musicians play the music they like from other artists.
I had shared a couple of the Mike Church song parodies. He is very talented and his show is focused more on the Constitution than left or right… call it libertarian.
SiriusXM in my opinion is making a mistake by not sharing more of its outstanding content with the public in the form of videos like those, or podcasts. It would cost them almost nothing and people would see that they have a quality product.
Why do we need Satellite? I’d be just as happy listening to their programming a week old, with the exception of the news, weather, traffic, talk channels. Put an Android in my dashboard and have it load up the programming each weekend via WIFI for the following week.
Sirius does offer an Internet only option. As cars become prewired with 4G, relying on a satellite or a network of ground stations is a step backwards
Because the Sirius feed wants to not drop out when you drive under an underpass, the streams are dual encoded with a significant time delay. If the first copy of the stream is garbled, it fills in the gaps when the second copy arrives. I want to say it is 30 seconds behind.
For music that means nothing – but for network news or talk it’s more of a problem. The 7 second dump delay maybe becomes 45. If the user makes the mistake of listening to the radio while on hold, he’ll be even more confused.
You reminded me that as a geeky kid, I used to brag that I could measure the speed of light with my ears…. ok, ok, and two tv sets, I needed too, but that was it, not even cable.
My parents lived where the NYC and Philadelphia TV markets overlap. I’d put one TV on the network affiliate from Philadelphia and the other on the network affiliate from New York City. Best as an untrained ear could tell, there was about 1/4 second delay before the audio (and video too, but I had my eyes closed to win the bet) came out of the TV tuned to the Philadelphia channel.
We all know that the geostationary birds are just over 23,000 miles from the US, or 46,000 miles for a round trip. 46,000 miles in 1/4 second is 184,000 miles per second…. not bad for two TVs and not even a stopwatch. 😉
I am one of the 20 million. I didn’t subscribe until after the merger, but I find the music suits me (all vinyl, deep tracks and 70’s music). Distinct liberal bent, but that’s the expected play in music, I think. I am not sure I would pay another dollar for talk radio on Sirius/XM – I would have to be in the vehicle during broadcasts and I am not.
Oh yes – Smerconish? He has a somewhat gentle voice, but accusing him of being a conservative is like accusing Art of living in Los Angeles – not close by half.
Dick Morris will be taking over for Smerconish, at least locally… But Dick will be looking for a different type of sucker
This is the week were I actually missed that Republicrat/Demopublican Arlen Specter. I just know that if he were alive today, he’d put forth a single pressure cooker theory consistent with Scots law and as genuine and in touch with reality as everything else he had done in his life. Mr Costello – some music please to tramp the dirt down.