For many people, listening to the radio is as much a part of their daily routine as eating peanut butter and jelly. But, as much as the radio is a part of our lives, it also comes with its frustrations. For example, we all know that there is a lot of static on the FM dial and that commercials can be annoying. In fact, a few years ago the Beach Boys even sang about this frustration in their song, “Surfing Safari.” Fortunately, there is an alternative to terrestrial broadcast radio that can eliminate these problems. This alternative is satellite radio.
Satellite radio is a digital broadcasting system that allows listeners to choose from a wide variety of music, news, sports, talk, and entertainment channels. Most services offer over a hundred channels of content and most are commercial free. Consumers subscribe to the service and receive a radio receiver, which decodes the encrypted signals sent by the satellite.
The history of Sirius and XM, two rival satellite radio services that recently merged, reveals the difficulty of making this new technology a success. The initial challenge was finding ways to get consumers to buy the hardware and then pay a monthly subscription fee. The key was to make the devices available where most consumers would listen, such as in cars and trucks. To do so, XM and Sirius worked closely with automobile manufacturers to make portable satellite radios standard equipment in high-end luxury vehicles and an option in most mid-range cars.
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