Good point about the radio law here. That could delay any additions of new channels. As it is now Sirius carries a bunch of extra CBC stations, English and French, that are already available free on FM (pretty redundant.)
I vaguely remember Stern getting run out of French Canadian markets years back. He mentions it once in a while on the show. During one of his free speech rants he commented on how Canadians hate free speech by referencing his ouster from Canadian markets when he was on terrestrial radio. I thought it was ironic he felt that way because the French Canadians he insulted had only exercised their free speech and got his ass bounced out of the market
Stern mentioned the other day a big XM layoff. He went from treating XM as an equal during the merger negotiations to almost gloating about the layoffs.
Hopefully we'll get a merged service eventually and there will be more to listen to in the mornings than Howard Stern. Indie Talk 110 is currently Sirius' best talk radio channel but the best show on it doesn't air till noon.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Greenie
Agent - you Canadians have silly radio laws as well as some deep hatred of Stern. So adding the Best Of stations to your service might put the percent of original Canadian programming below the line.
I drove to Ramster's with Yell last year & we were listening to one of the comedy channels on XM. We turned it down to cross the border & turned it back up once we were thru customs. About 10 min later, we both started to notice that the comedians had different accents & there were a lot of jokes that only Canadians & border people like us would get. They had changed us over to the Canadian comedy feed on that channel We heard 12 moose jokes!
As far as the pay-per-channel stuff, I assume that's still coming - OR - they are going to merge all the similar channels - XM's Lucy & Sirius's Lithium are basically the same channel already. So everyone will get the same music channels (good for them because they can sell ad spots based on a larger audience)
One of the big shit things about this is that the XM people are pretty much all being let go. XM's technology was at least a year ahead of Sirius - just look at the Inno compared to their 5 hours recorder with no portable live abilities. XM was always the better company in the stocks & in terms of users - it just sucks that all those doggy people will keep their jobs while traffic girl Dee Dee and The Mad Mexican & his dog Chicago have to look for work! |