XM and Sirius, sittin’ in a tree …

As this is ’sposed to be a blog about digital media (mostly) and since I’ve been an XM Radio subscriber for more than a year and half, I’ve been meaning to post about how much I love XM, and how I’m lukewarm on Sirius.

And then, last week XM Satellite Radio and Sirius Satellite Radio made official their plans to merge in the US. XM and Sirius in Canada are independent partner companies of the US corporations. I believe CBC owns up to 40% of Sirius in Canada.

The FCC will need to rule on whether the proposed merger will constitute a monopoly. Interestingly, the satellite operator’s best argument in support of a merger is the strong competition offered up by Internet radio, terrestrial HD radio, streaming audio/video over mobile networks, audio over digital TV, and of course podcasts. No doubt there’s future blog fodder here.

I first considered getting XM for the cottage. While I have about 200GB of music in my iTunes library and a 5th generation iPod, sometimes I don’t want to be the music programmer. That’s where XM is great; great music channels with deep playlists, higher fidelity audio than Sirius, no commercials on their music channels, BBC World Service, pretty decent comedy, and Major League Baseball — Summer just isn’t summer without baseball on the radio, and with XM, I can get every single Mets game, home or away. On top of that, XM even offered a dedicated channel for World Cup 2006. For me, Sirius doesn’t stack up.

It’s unclear how the merger might unfold in the US. Sirius and XM each operate their own satellites and their signals are incompatible with each other’s radios. They may, for the time being, duplicate their services over both sets of satellites, but there will surely be a purge of duplicate programming.

What will this mean for Canadian subcribers of one of the two services? Is a Canadian merger inevitable?

Stay … err, tuned.

Here’s a round-up of merger commentary from this past weekend on SatelliteLink.net

Here’s Tod Maffin on the merger