Via the New York Post:
Satellite radio operators Sirius and XM are expected to announce their long-awaited merger today, according to a source familiar with the deal.
The two sides were locked in negotiations over the weekend trying to hammer out a final agreement with an eye toward going public with the merger today in Washington, D.C., where XM is based, this source said.
While this has been rumored for quite a while, I’m not holding my breath as it’s been equally rumored that the FCC isn’t going to approve any such deal.
However, if it does happen, there are a couple of things I do wonder:
- How the heck am I going to stay subscribed, since one of the things that appeals to me about XM is that it doesn’t waste bandwidth on Howard Stern?
- If part of the deal is to combined the unique offerings at both companies, yet all subscribers today have equipment that receives either Sirius or XM signals…does that mean that they will sacrifice the music offerings for the talk shows and sports I could really care less about?
- On the music side, the biggest difference between XM and Sirius has traditionally been the relative depth of the playlists. Sirius fans complain that XM hardly ever plays the songs they actually want to hear, while XM fans deride Sirius’s tendency to play the same songs over and over and over again. So, I wonder which philosophy would prevail in a merged entity.
- Of course, if a merger meant that we finally got equipment that can tune both Sirius and XM frequencies, and we could get a broader range of music selections on a merged entity…that would be most excellent.
- And, in the unlikely circumstance of the FCC allowing this sort of a merger to happen, does it mean that the long-rumored DirecTV/Dish merger might also finally gain traction?
Fun things to ponder while I spend my day off doing a bit of pre-spring cleaning.