The Death of Satellite Radio

Wednesday, December 3, 2008 12:54

Is satelllite radio dead? Well, the stock has totally tanked. (Yeah, I got burned, like so many others.) Here’s an interesting perspective from Slashdot:

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Only a little over a year ago, the FCC approved the merger of XM and Sirius satellite radio companies and the combined stock was trading at $4 a share. Despite being a monopoly — or perhaps because of it — the company is failing. They are losing subscribers, the stock is now trading around 22 cents a share (a 97% decline), and they have written off $4.8 billion dollars in stock value. So, what happened? The CEO is blaming pretty much everyone except himself and his business model. But is pay-for-bandwidth even a viable business plan anymore? With millions of iPhone and gPhone users out there, free streaming audio applications like FStream, and thousands of Internet radio stations to access, the question is: why would anyone want to pay for proprietary hardware and a limited selection of a few hundred stations all controlled by one company?

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Posted by: Geoff Caplan

Web Publisher | Content Specialist at Regency Marketing, LLC | LeadFlash

Staff Writer for Money Remix

Webmaster of Marketing and Technology News and Geoff Caplan.Com

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