I have a feeling that this topic may inflame some long-time Sirius users, but this is a just a topic of conversation, so go easy
I'm a long-time Pandora user, and recently bought a new car that included an Sirius trial. First off, I love it! I didn't realize how bored I was getting with my Pandora stations. I also realized while the ability to skip and avoid songs I don't like is really neat on Pandora is really neat, it creates an issue... You end up "whittling" down your listening to a fairly small group of songs.
With that said, I do have some disappointments with Sirius, and I'm curious if this something other people are irritated with or if anyone has info about new products on the horizon that may address some of these issues.
1) Sound Quality - It's "Ok", but it's not great. I would say somewhere between a 96Kbps and 128Kbps MP3. Why is this annoying? Because it's sounds roughly the same level of quality my Dad had on his XM radio ten years ago! If you recall, 10 years ago 40" HDTV's was $2,000+ and iPods had spinning hard-drives. So needless to say a lot has changed in 10 years.
This is also really surprising being that Sirius is satellite based, where they have unilateral control over bandwidth requirements. This is in stark contrast to terrestrial-based cell networks where bandwidth comes at a premium and is tied to complicated contracts with cell providers.
Having a fat satellite-based pipe is a HUGE potential competitive advantage over Pandora. Pandora doesn't even offer their 192Kbps service on mobile devices, and that level of data would smoke the average metered data plan in a matter of days. With premium sound systems now being offered in just about every vehicle trim, customers will start to notice the quality difference over their wired device (ipod, phone, etc).
2) MySXM features in the dash - MySXM is awesome, it DEFINITELY adds some competitive advantage to Sirius and is honesty just better (in my opinion) than the customization tools used in Pandora. But without some of these preferences being filtered into my in-dash listening experience, I feel like a lot of the value is lost.
While I think it's impractical to add all the MySXM features in-dash, I think some very simple ones would go a long way. Some of you may be saying it isn't possible to have these features with a unidirectional satellite connection, but I would disagree...
My 2012 has the ability to "pause" a channel for HOURS. So on an average station, an hour is around 20 songs. By having the radio tag & cache songs that have already been heard on a given station, they could easily allow a "skip" feature that would use the time-shifting capabilities to skip to a cached song. This would be a huge value add.
You could then take this theory a step farther, and leave the user with an option to cache one or more stations and beef up the internal memory in the XM deck. 16GB of memory is dirt-cheap now, and would allow you to cache nearly 200 hours of audio @ 192Kbps. Almost double that at my estimated rate of 96Kbps of the current streams.
Does anyone know if there are any new products in the works that will add some of these features to in-dash car units?