By Frank Ahrens Washington Post Staff Writer
Satellite radio in a nutshell: I spent one night earlier this summer driving around and listening to the Washington Nationals close out an exciting win. Where I was driving around, however, was Charleston, W.Va., well outside the broadcast range of the Nationals' Z104/WFED radio network. It was not, however, out of range of XM Satellite Radio, which this season began carrying every game of all 30 Major League Baseball teams and beaming them across North America.
It was terrific to be able to keep up with the team from afar; every win sounded like the World Series on the radio, thanks to the vocal fans.
So, as the final out of this particular game was recorded, the Nats' announcer enthused, "Just listen to that crowd!" It was a cruel taunt. At that precise moment, I drove into one of a handful of dead spots around Charleston where XM service drops out for several seconds.
Hence, the often-simultaneous joy and frustration of satellite radio.
Now, with nearly 6 million subscribers between them, XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc. and Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. have established a foothold as a competitively priced entertainment option for auto, home and mobile use. Like the cell phone, however, satellite radio is an infant technology compared with its predecessor, which has had more than a century to perfect its delivery system. And, like an infant, it still spits up from time to time.
On the face, Sirius and XM are comparable services: Both have more than 60 channels of commercial-free music covering a broad spectrum of niches, from old-school country to today's hits, from the most experimental jazz to the spaciest New Age, from the raunchiest hip-hop to the kid-friendliest Radio Disney.
Each has channels devoted to music from the decades of the '40s to the '90s; each has bluegrass and standards channels, each has several hip-hop and classical channels and so on. XM has a fun unsigned bands channel that Sirius does not have; Sirius has a groovy, trip-hoppy electronica channel that has no XM equivalent.
Both also have more than 50 channels of news, talk and entertainment and share many of the same third-party providers: Fox News Channel, the BBC, Bloomberg, CNBC and CNN.
And both cost a fair amount of money over time: The receivers for each start at $50 (in some cases, after a mail-in rebate), and each service runs $12.95 a month before any family-plan or pay-in-advance discounts.
But over the course of their short life spans, each service has begun to develop a personality and a direction.
Music fans will find a deeper and better-defined selection of stations on XM.
Sports and talk fans, however, will gravitate toward Sirius, which broadcasts NFL and NBA games. Sirius also has swiped NASCAR from XM, starting in 2007, and will resume NHL games, assuming anyone cares. XM cannot rival this lineup. For live action, it offers only baseball, the PGA Tour, three college conferences and IndyCar racing. Through its carriage of ESPN, it also broadcasts the NBA playoffs but not the regular season.
Of course, Sirius also can claim the sui generis Howard Stern, who probably will be good for 1 million new subscribers on his own after he joins Sirius in January.