Competitors

Its been 11 months since the Apple iPhone App Store opened its doors and over a billion downloads later, there is still no sign of an official Sirius XM iPhone application. I should probably mention that the guys at Sirius XM have been saying that we should expect one “soon” which has fans everywhere asking the question… what the heck is taking so long?

As if things weren’t hard enough for fans of the Satellite Radio giant Sirius XM, yesterday they were dealt another blow when free internet radio specialists Pandora came through with a new application for the recently released Palm Pre. How is it that companies like Pandora, who by the way, had the most downloaded iPhone application of the entire year, can manage to turn out new applications in a matter of days while Sirius XM fans have had to endlessly wait?

Pandora now has a dedicated “on the go” page featuring free applications for four of the top smartphone platforms including the likes of Balckberry, iPhone, Windows mobile, and now, the only days old, Palm Pre. For those of you who might not know, the Palm Pre has only been on the market for a matter of days and already Pandora is locked, loaded, and ready to go.

The fact that the Pandora iPhone application was the most downloaded application of the entire year should be sounding off alarms in the heads of the movers and shakers at Sirius XM. There have been millions of iPhones sold and billions of applications downloaded and where was the biggest market? The audio entertainment market. What more do the people at Sirius XM need to see and how long will their loyal subscribers have to wait before they realize the importance of this new delivery system, which their fans won’t stop begging for and at the same time can put their content into the ears of millions of untapped consumers?

Slacker is continuing to broaden their reach in the Internet radio universe. The Slacker application, with over 1,000,000 downloads to their credit, has just turned up the volume again by releasing new apps for the iPhone and Blackberry with added features to improve the listening experience.

Slacker’s new app speeds the song-to-song transition, allows the user to read emails without interrupting their music listening, and still delivers high quality stereo sound that Slacker fans have come to expect. With four times as much variety as their nearest Internet radio competitor, Slacker is fast becoming a musical staple of iPhone and Blackberry users.

Sirius XM radio is nearing a launch of their own iPhone application, and with it a serious entrance into the Internet radio side of the audio entertainment world. Services such as Slacker can not afford to rest on their laurels, especially if Sirius XM markets their application aggressively. Slacker boasts that the application is free, and then up-sells consumers to a Slacker Plus services that eliminates commercials, allows unlimited skips, and lets users see album art, artist information, and song lyrics.

With the OEM channel slumping, Sirius XM’s iPhone application is taking on an importance for the company. Should the satellite provider gain traction with this application, their live non-music content such as news and sports will deliver a distinct advantage.

[via SlackerActive]

Long Sirius XM Radio

Those who love Sirius XM think that all of these “free” internet radio companies are no threat to the satellite radio business but, is that really true?

Top dog Pandora now has 27 million registered users and is growing strong to the tune of 50,000 new users per day. How does that growth rate compare to what Sirius XM has been pulling in lately? It doesn’t. How happy would investors be if SIRI was adding 1.5 million new users per month… it is probably safe to say that most would be happy if they added that many for the entire year of 2009.

The founder of Pandora also thinks that about 18,000 new subs per day can be attributed to their iPhone application alone. That being said, Pandora has been one of the top 20 downloads at the iPhone store since it was launched so, this should come as no surprise. This silver lining is that the potential for Sirius XM is still there but, the new Sirius XM iPhone application needs to sexy, it needs to get to market quickly, and it needs to be FREE if they ever hope to hit the 5 million download mark recently reached by Pandora.

Will Pandora continue to be a threat in the years to come? They, just like Sirius XM, will always have to deal with with those pesky royalty issues but, founder Tim Westergren is confident that revenues will double this year and he doesn’t seem to see any reason why the company should not be profitable in 2010. It seems to me that for the time being, Pandora is here to stay.

[via Mashable]

Throughout the merger process, HD Radio was a hot topic of discussion. There were proposals brought forth that wanted to mandate that satellite radio would have to include HD technology in every radio sold. Thankfully, capitalistic thoughts won out the debate, and the success of HD Radio would not be hinged on being coupled with satellite radio.

I am always a fan of letting the quality of a product or service, and the marketplace be the judge of whether a business succeeds or fails. To that end, it was always my opinion that HD Radio needed to put together a quality product and market it themselves. To their credit, they forged an early relationship with Ford, but momentum behind that relationship seemed lacking.

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Just as Sirius XM Radio is getting ready to launch their iPhone application, Slacker takes another step out in front to differentiate itself. Slacker will be featured as a standard application on the soon to be released Sony X-Series Walkman.

The new Sony X-Series features some state of the art features that iPod has not even addressed yet. Priced to compete with Apple’s iPod touch, and with the benefit of a strong brand name in electronics, the Sony X-Series promises to be a popular choice for consumers.

Features include standard noise cancellation, an FM tuner, standard Slacker, and the latest in video screen technology.

[via SlackerActive]

It’s only been a few weeks since the launch of the Slacker iPhone application and already the guys at Slacker have another streaming app. ready to go for the Blackberry Storm. This latest app. allows Blackberry users in the U.S with an OS of 4.3 or higher to stream their favorite stations through the network or WIFI connection.

This sharp and intuitive interface brings all of Slacker features from the web right to the palm of your hand with full touchscreen capabilities and a new performance enhancing caching system to reduce power consumption by up to 5 times that of streaming playback.

This leaves me asking myself one question… why would Slacker waste their time with all of these fancy newfangled portable applications? I mean, they can’t be that important for business… right? If they were, surely Sirius XM would have created their own by now.

[via SlackerActive]

The guys over at Slacker have officially released a shiny new iPhone application for their increasingly popular Slacker online streaming radio service. The free application is available for all iPhone and iTouch users by visiting Slacker.com/iPhone or by simply heading over to the Apple iPhone App Store.

Fans of Sirius XM have to be asking themselves… what gives? Slacker doesn’t have half the resources Sirius XM does, yet fans of Slacker have a sleek web application and a spanking new iPhone App while Sirius XM subscribers are forced to use a clunky interface that doesn’t even work in all browsers.

While Sirius XM is busy restructuring, cutting programming, and searching for financing the rest of the audio entertainment industry is innovating and passing them by. Make no mistake about it, every day that Sirius XM does not have an iPhone App available they are losing potential subscribers to their competitors.

[via Slackeractive]

We have written about the ability to get Sirius XM on your Blackberry. The interface is slick and the service gives subscribers yet another option to stay tuned to any of twenty Sirius XM channels. For satellite radio subscribers the migration to the world of cellular has been a long one. Now, offerings from other audio entertainment companies are stepping up to the plate, and doing it in a big way.

I recently downloaded the new Slacker application to my Blackberry, and have been playing around with it for a couple of days. The full review is available on SlackerActive. The advantage Slacker has here is that the full functionality of their service has made it to the Blackberry. Saving songs, banning them, and navigating through the huge selection of music and comedy channels is all there with Slacker’s Blackberry application.

This is not “Slacker Lite”, it is Slacker… right there on your Blackberry device. Best of all, you can even cache some of your favorite or customized stations to your device, not only saving you data charges, but eliminating some buffering, extending battery life, and taking the worry of cell coverage out of the equation. When you refresh your cached stations you have fresh new content that will keep your ears happy for hours.

It is time for satellite radio to make the next step in their Blackberry arsenal.

Position - Long Sirius XM