What a brutal headline from Motley Fool!
Sirius XM Is In Trouble
And just who is Travis Hoium?
Printable View
What a brutal headline from Motley Fool!
Sirius XM Is In Trouble
And just who is Travis Hoium?
Tyler Savery in drag?Quote:
Originally Posted by SchultzyMN
Thanks for the link.
I got my first smart phone a month or two ago. Unimpressed. The convenience of SXM in the car cannot be beat. Who wants to plug in, find your app, launch it....
I don't get it.
Can you use your phone while your streaming? How about the GPS function so many like?
don't sweat it schultzy . . it's loaded with mistakes and errors . . no one takes that site seriously; it is a complete laughing stock
just one for instance . . "Registered Users" is not the same as verified "Listeners"
but anyway . . Pandora is "on the block"
Westergren is in full pump mode . . the only way for Tim to cash-out this type of business platform (monetize the concept) is to sell it.
So what you are seeing now is the shill-media pump job . . CNBC did the same pump the other day
When you pump for the sale, you must first prime the pump. You prime the pump by trying to attach yourself to a name with superior brand recognition . . you try to get mentioned with Sirius XM as much as you can.
Pandora is simply readying itself for sale to an entity that can implement the service as a loss-leader add-on to a larger, profitable, business.
"Pandora is an advertising business." Mel Karmazin September 15, 2010
would actually be better to just paste the whole article here and take down the link . . the link simply drives traffic to the site . . which is the entire point of the article.Quote:
Originally Posted by SchultzyMN
Here's the whole thing . . avoid clicking the link:
Sirius XM Is In Trouble
By Travis Hoium | More Articles
October 6, 2010 | Comments (25)
Sirius XM Radio (Nasdaq: SIRI) has some serious competition coming its way and it may need more than Howard Stern to save the day. Sirius' turn back to profitability after years of losses comes at the same time smartphones threaten its very existence.
Yesterday, CNBC highlighted Pandora's inroads into the mobile radio market, attracting more than 65 million registered listeners in the U.S. But Pandora isn't the only competitor Sirius should be worried about. All sorts of apps are popping up, from Slacker Radio, which offers a similar experience to Pandora; to iheart Radio, which provides radio stations from around the country; and even to Howard Stern, who has threatened to develop a premium app for smartphones. ESPN has also built a radio app offering football games, podcasts, and audio from popular television shows. Apps for smartphones are relatively easy to build, don't require a large capital investment, and can be used on a variety of devices.
Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL), Research In Motion (Nasdaq: RIMM), and Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG) Android dominate the smartphone market with 80.1% market share, concentrating apps in a relatively small group. comScore (Nasdaq: SCOR) reported that 53.4 million phones, 22.8% of mobile phones, in the U.S. were smartphones during the second quarter, up 11% from the first quarter and up 25.1% since January. So the market Sirius should fear most, smartphones, is growing by double digits every quarter. As new smartphone users become more aware of available applications and developers build more apps, I can't see how Sirius could maintain its subscriber base near 20 million.
Sirius has seen a financial turnaround, but its operations are highly leveraged, paying fixed contracts to talent and upkeep on infrastructure. So, Sirius' financial performance can go south as fast as it has improved. It also has more than $3 billion in long-term debt, a huge load if Sirius can't keep adding subscribers.
I'm not suggesting nearly 19 million subscribers will disappear overnight, but I am saying investors need to watch Sirius' subscriber totals closely in coming quarters. The company has done well keeping subscribers thus far, with a low 1.9% churn rate in the first half of 2010 and increasing revenue per subscriber, but earnings have yet to exceed $50 million in a quarter.
Analysts are expecting another year of weak profit with $0.01 earnings per share in 2011. With a $5 billion market cap, that's equivalent to a forward price/earnings multiple of more than 100. I think investors have gotten ahead of themselves on this one
I laughed when I read the headline, not worried because I still believe content is king. Case in point for me happened today. I wanted to listen to the Tampa Bay-Texas game on the radio, but our local ESPN affiliate is not airing the game. Keep in mind that the Twin Cities are #16 in Arbitron with a population base of three million people. However, not ONE station in the Twin Cities will carry ANY of the games from ESPN. Satellite radio however has all of the games. I might add that I was hoping to hear the ESPN announcers and not the local feed. Terrestrial radio just keeps shooting themselves in the foot!