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Posts Tagged ‘cable’

Satellite radio is the hottest trend in radio entertainment for your car, home, and office. The freedom from commercials and static is an exhilarating experience. No longer do you have listen to obnoxious jingles and hot air. No longer are you condemned to choose between dead air and Country & Western when traveling in rural areas.

Commercial-Free, Digital-Quality Sound

All of these problems are solved with satellite radio. And there is nothing else in the radio world that can compete with its digital quality sound. Satellite can provide uninterrupted listening pleasure anywhere in the world.

The only problem is deciding upon which satellite radio provider to choose. The top 2 contenders are Sirius and XM Radio. If you want satellite radio, you are immediately faced with the issue of how to choose between them.

XM Radio, First In The Sky

XM Radio established its presence first, and has a market share of 2 million listeners. XM has had the time to establish an excellent system of 68 commercial-free music channels with an incredible array of music. It also adds 33 channels of news, sports, talk shows, and entertainment to its programming mix. To top it off, XM has revolutionized the satellite radio world by providing 21 channels of up-to-date weather and traffic for most of the major metropolitan areas in the United States.

Sirius, Radio Innovator On Satellite TV

Sirius may be the comparative upstart, but it offers some advantages of its own. New contacts with DISH Network satellite television have given Sirius access to more than 10 million subscribers. It provides more than 120 channels if you add up all of the music, sports, information and entertainment.

For sports, Sirius is hard to beat. It broadcasts live games for professional football and hockey leagues, as well as many other sporting events. Sirius will also be the home of Howard Stern in 2006.

Remember the days when we thought paying for our TV service was ridiculous? “Cable TV!”, our mothers would exclaim, “Who has money to pay for their TV shows? It’s been free all these years; I don’t know why I would start paying for it now.”

But that was then and this is now. Today we pay for cable or satellite and consider it a necessity in our lives, not a luxury. Sure, we could stick with “free” TV, but the reception would be bad, we’d only have 4-6 channels to choose from and there would be no CNN, no Food Network, and no ESPN. What would we do with ourselves?

So it seems a little reminder of those days when we hear people scoffing at the notion of paying for radio. “I’ve gotten it free all these years,” you hear people exclaim. “Why would I pay for radio?”

Although satellite radio services have been around for a few years, its notoriety was spun into high gear when Howard Stern publicly made the jump from “free” radio to a satellite service in early 2006. Now, everyone’s curious and many people are considering paying a bill every month for the privilege of listening to the radio.

Just like cable TV, there are many proprietary shows on satellite radio you just won’t hear if you don’t have a subscription. So you have to pony up to the extra bill bar…but what do you get for your extra dough?

Lots. Talk shows, music shows, entertainment, sports.

Some of the most talked about XM Satellite Radio shows are not music shows but talk shows. There are literally more than a dozen to choose from.

Consider Air America Radio (on channel 167), which features chatter from such well-known mouths as those belonging to Al Franken, Jerry Springer and actress Janeane Garofalo. Largely a progressive station, this dial also features veteran radio host Mark Riley and commentator Alan Colmes.

For the right slant on things, take a listen to America Right (on channel 166). This program features shows from such luminary conservatives as G. Gordon Liddy, Peter Greenburg, Dr. Laura and Michael Medved.

If politics aren’t your bag, how about entertainment or humor? On XM Radio channel 162, you’ll find the E! channel. Yes, this is the same E! we pay for on cable and the format is generally the same. There’s the E! True Hollywood Story, E! news and celebrity profiles. Now you can get all your E! gossip and news while drinking Starbucks on your way to work. My, how the world has changed.

If you’re into sports, XM Radio delivers. There’s the Sporting News channel, the Nascar channel, the ESPN channel, and a wide variety of channels dedicated to various sports like baseball, football and even hockey. Though many channels feature talk and sports opinion, one of the big selling points for many sports fans is the live streaming games. In this case, you truly can take it with you.

Got kids in the car? Tune into Radio Disney or XM Kids, the winner of several parents’ choice awards.

Satellite radio is one of the biggest improvements in broadcasting since the introduction of FM. Satellite radio signal can be broadcasted for more than 35,000 kilometers (22,000 miles) with complete clarity and high quality sound. You will never get static interferences while listening to over 100 radio channels. The idea behind satellite radio has appeared in 1992, when the United States Federal Communications Commission granted a spectrum of the S band (the 2.3 GHz frequency) for Digital Audio Radio Service. The license to broadcast in that band was allocated to Sirius Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio in 1997. Now there are three companies that provide satellite radio in the world: Sirius and XM in Northern America and WorldSpace in Asia, Europe and Africa.

Each of these companies offer different broadcasting systems, since the radio signal of each is proprietary. This means that you will have to buy different hardware depending on your subscription to one of these companies. However, there are three components common to all satellite radio services: the satellites, the ground repeaters and the radio receivers. Different satellite radio companies broadcast the radio signal in different ways. For instance, XM satellite radio uses geostationary satellites which have orbits that are synchronized with the movement of Earth. These satellites are located above the equator. In order to allow subscribers to receive crystal-clear signal despite obstacles such as buildings, hills or bridges, XM satellite radio service has installed a network of repeaters antennas that receive the radio signal from the satellites and retransmit it to the subscriber’s receiver Sirius, on the other hand, uses satellites that have unique elliptical orbits around Earth. These kinds of orbits allow satellites to get higher in the sky than geostationary satellites and this prevents loss of signal. This is the reason why Sirius has fewer terrestrial repeaters than XM.