GM and Toyota Balk at HD Requirement
In an interesting development in the proposed merger of Sirius and XM, General Motors and Toyota jointly issued a letter to the FCC stating their opposition to the requirement that HD be mandated in all SDARS receivers.
The letter states, ” The proponents of the proposed condition are seeking an unprecedented requirement regulating the choice of entertainment technologies in an automotive environment.”
GM and Toyota also point out that HD radio is already making inroads into the OEM channel without regulation.
Contrary to statements from Ibiquity that SDARS is blocking the ability of HD to be installed in cars, GM and Toyota point out, “Nothing in our companies’ respective agreements with XM inhibits our ability to offer HD radio.”
It has been my contention for quite some time that Ibiquity is seeking to avoid negotiations with OEM partners who may want not only subsidies, but a revenue share as well. By seeking a regulated installation, Ibiquity could piggyback on SDARS, and leave the OEM’s with nothing.
Long Sirius, XM. No Position OEM’s
This great news! GM and Toyota have joined forces to turn against HD Radio, which doesn’t even work!
XM Canada loss grows, subscribers jump 58 pct
2 hours ago – Reuters
TORONTO (Reuters) – XM Canada, the Canadian licensee of XM Satellite Radio Inc, posted a wider third-quarter loss on Thursday, but said its subscriber base jumped 58 percent and it achieved positive cash flow for the first time.
The satellite radio company said it lost C$18.8 million ($18.6 million), or 39 Canadian cents a share, in the three months ended May 31. That was worse than the loss of C$13.3 million, or 28 Canadian cents a share, in the same period a year earlier.
The company said total revenue rose to C$10.3 million from C$5.7 million a year earlier and that its subscriber base rose to 439,000 in the quarter.
It also said it booked C$300,000 of positive cashflow, adding: “this milestone was attained in only two and a half years.”
XM Canada said its average monthly subscription revenue per user rose to C$11.99 from C$11.70 a year earlier.
“Much of this growth is attributable to an increasing proportion of our subscribers transitioning from our previous basic monthly subscription price of $12.99 to the current price of $14.99,” the company said.
XM Canada’s shares haven’t traded since Tuesday, when they changed hands at C$3.80.
($1=$1.01 Canadian)
(Reporting by Wojtek Dabrowski; editing by Rob Wilson)
There is an article in the Washington Post about Kevin Martin’s rein as FCC Chief. He mentions brokering a deal between XM/SIRI and makes it sound as if it is a done deal!! Look for a pop in the Stock price!
I think GM and Toyota just cut off HD radio’s nuts.
Just what does Ibiquity mean by “HD” anyway?
After reading your opinions on HD-R recently I thought you might find this of interest. In a recent Reuters articles entitled, “HD Digital Radio Alliance Expands Marketing Campaign to Convert Consumer Awareness…” An HD Alliance spokesman claims an exponential growth in traffic to HDRadio.com. I feel this statement maybe misleading, after all if they had 1 hit in 2006 and then 7 hits in 2008 isn’t that exponential growth? Without actual numbers who knows what they mean and what happened to’07?
“The Alliance also revealed that traffic to HDRadio.com continues to grow exponentially, with the number of page views so far in 2008 exceeding that of 2006, the site’s first year.”
This started me thinking Google Trends (G/T) charts how often a particular search term is entered relative the total search volume across various regions of the world, and in various languages. I understand this is not a definitive method but in the absence of actual numbers it could be a rough indicator of actual interest. Look what happens when you use G/T to look up the site http://www.hdradio.com:
“Your terms – http://www.hdradio.com – do not have enough search volume to show graphs.”
http://www.google.com/trends?q.....038;sort=0
Then I thought, “Who googles a web address”? But, if you try http://www.ipod.com, http://www.sirius.com or http://www.xmradio.com they all come back graphed with results. I think the HD spinster may be laying it on a bit thick I find it hard to believe that http://www.hdradio.com generates no G/T data yet they’ve had “meaningful” growth over two years. To be fair HD radio does create Gtrend data but it includes both pro and con sites in its data set. It seems to me hdradio.com is actually HDOA.