Great American Country (GAC) host Storme Warren will be joining XM Radio as the host of the afternoon drive slot on Highway 16 starting on June 9th.

Warren's live afternoon drive show, which will air 2pm - 6pm ET, will debut on Monday, June 9th.

Warren's addition coincides with the upcoming opening of XM's new Nashville headquarters at the Sommet Center Arena Tower where the show will originate from daily. The brand-new, state-of-the-art facility will house office space, operations, production facilities, and seven studios - including a stunning, glass-walled performance studio overlooking downtown Nashville and the Ryman Auditorium.

Before his show's debut, Storme Warren will also participate in XM's exclusive coverage of the 2008 CMA Music Fest, June 2nd - June 9th, which will feature live concerts from the Chevy Stage, Fan Club Parties, and other live performances.

He will also continue as host and co-executive producer of "Country Music Across America" on Great American Country Television.

XM will cap its first season of carrying college baseball games from the six power conferences - the ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-10, and SEC - with conference tournament games starting May 21st.

XM greatly expanded its college baseball programming for 2008 with a slate of more than 70 regular-season and tournament games.

Every game of the Big 12 baseball championship will air on XM. For the SEC and ACC tournaments, XM will carry ten games for each tournament, including the finals and semifinals. For the Big East and Big Ten tournaments, XM will carry the finals and semifinals.

The Pac-10, which has college baseball games on XM during the regular season, does not hold a tournament at season's end - so who cares.

Following their marathon of meetings with the FCC, Primosphere wants to make clear its position on the ownership of spectrum: they don't want to just lease spectrum, they want the spectrum licensed to them.

"Primosphere is not looking to 'lease' a portion of the DARS spectrum," the company writes in a recent filing with the agency. "Rather, Primosphere is asking that its pending application be granted in part so that Primosphere will be a licensee of the DARS spectrum. Furthermore, Primosphere hereby restates it proposal... to offer free DARS service."

According to the filing, if the FCC approves the merger between Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. and XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc., Primosphere urges the agency to simultaneously license a portion of the DARS spectrum to the company.

"Primosphere's proposed free service will ensure that consumers have an alternative to the combined XM/Sirius," the letter concludes.

[View FCC Filing (PDF)]

Georgetown Partners, the minority-owned firm that analyzes FCC regulated markets "for opportunities to extend minority ownership and control," recently met with public interest groups to discuss set aside provisions of Sirius-XM spectrum, according to a recent filing.

The privately-owned firm, headed up by Chester Davenport (pictured), is asking the Federal Communications Commission to require that 20% of Sirius-XM's broadcast infrastructure be leased to a "independent new entrant."

In a letter to FCC Chairman Martin, Davenport outlined his meeting with public interest groups Public Knowledge and Media Access Project. Both groups have suggested to the FCC that 5% of spectrum from a merged Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. and XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc. be dedicated for non-commercial, educational programming.

Georgetown Partners agrees that the proposals by Public Knowledge and Media Access Project (as well as its own) would indeed "benefit consumers and serve the public interest." But Davenport feels that there are "technical barriers" that would hinder this content from being delivered in the digital format and bandwidth necessary, according to the letter.

As a result, Georgetown laid out a plan to "further the public interest objectives" shared by the groups. They include:

• Georgetown will "accept delivery of the program streams" in an agreed manner
• Will "at its own expense" encode the programming into the required digital format
• And finally will "transport and deliver" the programming, along with its own programming, to the merged entity.

All costs for the acceptance, encoding, and delivery of programming would be graciously absorbed by Georgetown Partners, according to the letter.

Chester Davenport highlights that their plan would be to broadcast satellite radio programming to all receivers - subscribers or not - and so would further the objectives of Public Knowledge and Media Access Project.

"We estimate that today there are 36 million such receivers in the marketplace, of which roughly 50 percent, or 18 million, are not subscribed," writes Davenport. "Implementing any educational set-aside in this manner will double the potential audience for the non-commercial programming."

Finally, Davenport feels that the educational set-aside is separate and distinct from Georgetown Partners' own 20% proposal. But if both proposals are realized, Georgetown "will dedicate resources to make sure that the non-commercial educational uses become reality."

[Read the entire letter (PDF)]
Bonus: Listen to yesterday's Orbitcast Radio show featuring Public Knowledge co-founder Gigi Sohn where we briefly discussed Georgetown Partners' proposal.

Martha Stewart and Mario Batali will sit down for a live one-on-one interview on "At Martha's Table," a series on Sirius featuring Martha herself conducting in-depth, intimate conversations with today's most influential tastemakers.

Martha and Mario will discuss his new book Italian Grill, as well as his career, inspirations and future plans.

Internationally-recognized for his passionate and innovative Italian and Spanish cooking, Mario Batali is one of America's top restaurateurs.

Mario currently has 12 restaurants around the country, including Babbo Ristorante e Enoteca, Del Posto, and Otto Enoteca Pizzeria in New York City; Osteria Mozza in Los Angeles and Enoteca San Marco in Las Vegas.

The show will air live on Wednesday, May 14th from 2pm - 3pm ET on Martha Stewart Living Radio (ch 112), from the showcase studio at Sirius Satellite Radio in NYC.

XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc. chief executive officer Nate Davis told investors yesterday that if the company included promotional subscribers into the tally, XM would have 10.8 million subscribers.

This is the second time that XM management has brought this to light.

"XM does not report promotional subscribers when a new vehicle is manufactured, but rather only counts a subscriber when a vehicle is sold, and when we have a paid subscription," said Davis.

In the past, XM has not included XM-equipped vehicles that have been manufactured and shipped to dealers in its subscriber count.

"This is the so-called 'parking lot' sub-number," Davis told investors. "At the end of the first quarter, there were an estimated 1.5 million of these vehicles."

Sirius did not discuss the so-called "parking lot" subscribers during their most recent conference call, but during the Q4 call CFO David Frear said that the number accounted for 11% of the company's subscriber base.

"In essence, if XM included these unsold vehicles in the first quarter results, we would have reported an ending subscriber total of roughly 10.8 million, gross additions of roughly 1.24 million, net additions of roughly 505,000, an improvement in churn from 2.7 down to 2.3%, and a subscriber acquisition cost improvement of roughly 15% below the reported $73 per subscriber," added Nate Davis yesterday.

That should stir the pot a bit.

Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. CEO Mel Karmazin told investors during yesterday's earnings call that if the Federal Communications Commission imposes conditions that are too harsh, then the company will not go through with the deal.

"If it turns out that the conditions are such that they are so egregious that they are not in the shareholders' or subscribers' best interest, then we will not do it," said Karmazin yesterday.

Echoing Karmazin's sentiment, Sirius CFO David Frear said Tuesday that the company is prepared to reject conditions that federal regulators might impose if they are deemed too restrictive.

"The company won't do anything - the company won't agree to a set of conditions that's going to adversely impact, and would not be to the benefit of, our current subscribers, our future subscribers, and our shareholders," Frear said. "It's all got to make sense."

Frear described the negotiations with the FCC as a "tortured path," first announced in February of last year.

"The FCC process is in many ways a political process," Frear said. "There is a well-worn tradition of exploiting, of opportunistic parties looking to exploit the regulatory process of the FCC for what is their personal gain.

"In a week, we'll be 15 months into this for what is honestly, in the broader media landscape, an incredibly unimportant public policy decision," Frear said.

Karmazin also expressed his frustrations to investors over the deal taking so long.

"We filed our application at the FCC over 400 days ago," Karmazin told investors. "It is almost 350 days on the FCC clock from when it was put on public notice. The FCC historically tries to review deals within 180 days.

"We share the reasonable frustration that many of our investors feel regarding the time it has taken," added the CEO. "We also share the outrage that some have expressed to me regarding press reports of opportunistic parties trying to take advantage of the process and extract value for themselves that properly belongs to Sirius subscribers and shareholders."

"I can assure you we will work with the regulators on any conditions they feel should be attached to an approval."

According to Orbitcast's count, it has been 420 days since Sirius and XM filed their application with the FCC.

Despite falling U.S. auto sales, XM Satellite Radio delivered the highest number of vehicle based subscriptions in satellite radio history, said CEO Nate Davis during yesterday's earnings call.

"Even with the relative softness in the US auto-market, XM delivered the largest number of OEM growth additions in the history of satellite radio," Davis said.

XM had over 800,000 gross OEM additions and roughly a million factory installed XM radios manufactured and delivered to dealers in the quarter, Davis told investors. "That is a 48% year-over-year quarterly increase."

XM ended the quarter 355,000 net subscriber additions from the OEM channel, while Sirius brought in over 321,000 net subscribers from the automotive channel.

Still, XM had a net loss of 51,000 subscribers from the Retail channel, while Sirius squeaked out just over an additional 2,500 subscribers from Retail

Davis explained that while the company had successfully increased direct retail sales to their website and call centers, those increases did not offset "the continuing decline in overall retail sales through the big box retailers."

"However, offsetting this retail weakness... is a continued acceleration of our OEM growth," said the CEO. "XM 2008 installations could well exceed 4 million units close to the long range estimate we provided a number of year's ago."

[Transcript via SeekingAlpha]

I don't think anyone thought we would still be doing this comparison since the merger was announced, I sure didn't, but here we are again. The above chart shows the total cumulative subscribers comparing Sirius and XM.

Total Satellite Radio Subscribers:

• Sirius: 8,644,319
  
• XM: 9,330,000
  

But while the total subscriber numbers are interesting, I think it's the net and gross additions that are most significant.


Above is a chart shows the quarterly net subscriber additions dating back two years. Look at Q1 of this year: Sirius and XM are nearly equal in quarterly net additions. This is a significant shift from prior quarters where Sirius truly dominated.

Quarterly Net Additions:

• Sirius: 322,354
  
• XM: 303,000
  

So let's take a look at gross subscriber additions:
This chart shows a different picture of XM once again dominating gross subscriber additions - albeit, just barely.

Quarterly Gross Additions:

• Sirius: 1,003,422
  
• XM: 1,034,000
  

To their credit, XM did a great job in gaining gross subscribers from the same period last year - the question is whether this trend will continue for future quarters. But that's a question (at least for these Sirius vs. XM comparisons) that may not matter if the FCC actually makes a decision.

Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. today announced its earnings and financial results for the first-quarter of 2008.

Sirius ended the quarter with 8,644,319 subscribers, up 31% from the first quarter of last year. Retail subscribers increased 10% year over year to 4,643,215, while OEM subscribers increased 72% year over year to 3,986,818. During the quarter, Sirius added 322,534 net subscribers - achieving a 52% share of satellite radio net subscriber additions.

Total revenue for 1Q08 increased to $270.4 million, up 33% from 1Q07 total revenue of $204 million.

Sirius reported a net loss of $104.1 million, or $0.07 per share, up 28% from the same period last year. The adjusted loss from operations was $39.5 million, an improvement of 53% compared to the adjusted loss from operations of $84 million last year.

Average monthly revenue per subscriber (ARPU) was $10.42 in first quarter 2008 as compared with $10.46 for first quarter 2007. First quarter 2008 average all-in customer churn was 2.7%. SAC per gross subscriber addition was $91 in first quarter 2008, an improvement over first quarter 2007's SAC per gross subscriber addition of $101.

Full financials after the jump...