Competition? Nope, still not, because it's not live. Slacker can't possibly carry live sports content, can't carry talk shows until after they air, can't carry news and information content, all of which needs to be live. It's simply not capable of the range of applications that satellite radio is, if I'm reading this right.

As a matter of fact, not only would I not consider it competition, I'd want to keep the comaparisons to a minimum. Remember the music industry trying to frame XM and Sirius as distributors of music a la iTunes, when we all know they're broadcasters? Well, Slacker is distribution, just as they say, and trying to frame them as competition to XM and Sirius might get the latter in some hot water due to the confusion.

Well, they haven't yet said they *can't* broadcast live. But I agree it sounds unlikely.

And, IMO, it would only be a matter of time until Slacker offers podcasts. The most popular podcasts could be sent via satellite, and the rest could be downloaded over Wi-Fi or when the device is synced to a home computer.

Interesting, though, that it would be a *free* satellite service (with only a one-time device purchase required). This certainly could help XM/Sirius in terms of pricing competition. Free or $7.50 price points would certainly force the merged satellite radio entity to keep prices at least where they are, and quite possibly, offer a cheaper package of just music (my guess is that even the "just music" package will include one or two news channels, The Weather Channel, Emergency Alert 247, and (the likely forthcoming) public interest channels.

Jim:

XM/Sirius can trot out the research that indicates that the majoriy of TSL on satellite is to music channels. They'll bring out a figure that x% of their subscribers spend 90%-plus of their time listening to music (combining the two companies and not accounting for dualsubs, I suspect that x is probably north of 50 and higher on XM than on Sirius).

For those music-only subs, Slacker will be a superior service, because it adds discovery to the personalizability of personal music players, which heretofore has been the primary liability of those units when compared to satrad music.

Royalties will probably mean that Slacker will charge in the vicinity of $8/month when all is said and done, probably with a per-song royalty plus a per-subscribed receiver royalty based on the storage capacity (which would probably imply that subscription rates will be set by the unit's capacity)... this isn't that different from what Sirius has for the S50/SL10/SL100 and what the merged company will probably have for the Inno/etc.

XM/Sirius could, of course, counter this service with some interesting hardware that's been kicking around my head for quite a while. Here's how this works:

* You program in your 20-30 artist/song seeks into the receiver and a new channel (say channel zero) appears on your radio
* This channel watches for when your seeks come on. If you're currently tuned to channel zero, instead of alerting you, it starts recording the channel the song is playing on, and when the currently playing song ends, the seeked song will begin playing, followed by the tracks being played on that channel (such tracks presumably being broadly similar to the seek'd song...) until another seek triggers. It can be done with the current-size replay buffers. When not listening to channel zero, the seeks work as they do now.

I wonder how big the satellite radio antenna will be for the Slacker car kit. If the car antenna is at the size of the KVH TracVision A7 low profile dish they will only find a limited number of customers who are willing to carry such antenna monsters on their cars even with an affordable price.

This service wants to make me cancel my XM. No talking DJ's! Yay!