Thoughts on Sirius vs Pandora

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10-07-2014, 01:42 PM
jeffhoward001

Thoughts on Sirius vs Pandora

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?
10-07-2014, 07:50 PM
SiriusBuzz

Quote:

Originally Posted by jeffhoward001

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.

Agreed. That said, some channels have a better bit-rate than others. The satellite has a limited amount of bandwidth so they pump up the more popular stations and dial down the less popular ones -- it stinks!

BTW, they still have very old satellites in service -- hence the still limited bandwidth.

Quote:

Originally Posted by jeffhoward001

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.

How does that work when you first turn the car on? There is no cache. You'd have to start your car, hit pause for "HOURS" and then jump in for a ride.

Quote:

Originally Posted by jeffhoward001

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.

Now you run into licensing issues. SiriusXM pays royalties every time a song is played but, if they allowed you to save the song to some kind of solid state memory, you could play it thousands of times without paying the royalty for those plays back to the artist. It doesnt work.
10-08-2014, 02:36 PM
jeffhoward001

Quote:

Originally Posted by SiriusBuzz

BTW, they still have very old satellites in service -- hence the still limited bandwidth.

I did some searching on Wikipedia, and it sounds like new Satellites were launched in 2009, 2010, and 2013. I guess what I'm more curious about is whether Mgmt at SiriusXM is worried about losing customers to other online services due to higher-quality services now being offered in-dash. Would be a shame to see such a good service lose customers due to quantity over quality.

Quote:

Originally Posted by SiriusBuzz

How does that work when you first turn the car on? There is no cache. You'd have to start your car, hit pause for "HOURS" and then jump in for a ride.

This would require a new player or firmware update to existing players that would allow the cache to persist in non-volatile memory. I know most of the in-dash systems shipped with new cars have non-volatile memory and most are basic *nux appliances. Not sure how the XM receiver integrates with the car 'infotainment OS' though. At a minimum this would be possible on future hardware.

Quote:

Originally Posted by SiriusBuzz

Now you run into licensing issues. SiriusXM pays royalties every time a song is played but, if they allowed you to save the song to some kind of solid state memory, you could play it thousands of times without paying the royalty for those plays back to the artist. It doesnt work.

So I thought about the licensing issues, but I believe you could get around that programmatically, and some of those issues already exist today. For example my in-dash OEM Dodge player caches an hour of content if I leave a channel paused. If the RIAA really wanted to get nit-picky about royalties, I could technically listen to the same stream a thousand times using the current technology.

But being realistic, that's dumb and no one is going to do that. Plus you could programmically account for that by making simple rules that a single cached tracked can't be "skipped to" more than 2-3 times per day (guessing 2-3 times per day is probably the average that a track is played live). Once you've skipped to all your cached tracks more than two times in a given day, you're "out of skips" similar to the rules that Pandora has in place.

I guess my point is that several other online services have negotiated similar deals with the RIAA, and with SiriusXM's size and clout (they have more premium paid-for content then any online service I'm aware of), if anyone could get the RIAA to be flexible, it would be Sirius.

All that said, I really like the service and I'm going to stick with if for at least a year. But the business man in me sees the writing on the wall that there's a slew of formidable competitor knocking at the door, and the terrestrial data "pipes" and connectivity options (bluetooth-integrated in-dash apps) are getting better every year. Resting on your laurels in said situations usually ends poorly.

This situation is very reminiscent of Palm Inc. Huge passionate user base, first-mover in the space, very profitable for years. They had EVERYTHING they needed to create the iPhone years before Apple. In fact, I was part Palm user group in 2005/2006 begging Palm to put the Treo cell stack in a wide-screen device with a touchscreen keyboard.

But they had a lazy CEO that loved the Treo keyboard and a ex-founder that was in love with PalmOS (which was a terribly dated OS that couldn't handle real multi-media programming. Even worse? The invented the a cloud-based sub-notebook a full FOUR YEARS before google released the Chromebook. They even had a Linux-based Os fully developed for the Foleo that would have easily ported to a cell phone.

But I digress... :) Anyway, I really hope Sirius doesn't end up in the same boat. It's great product that just needs a little updating to keep up with the competition and stay "attractive" to the next generation of technology-savvy consumers.
10-08-2014, 07:22 PM
SiriusBuzz

Quote:

Originally Posted by jeffhoward001

I did some searching on Wikipedia, and it sounds like new Satellites were launched in 2009, 2010, and 2013.

They launched new satellites but, the old ones are still in service. I am fairly certain that they are in different orbits to better handle reception in different parts of the country.

Quote:

Originally Posted by jeffhoward001

I guess what I'm more curious about is whether Mgmt at SiriusXM is worried about losing customers to other online services due to higher-quality services now being offered in-dash. Would be a shame to see such a good service lose customers due to quantity over quality.

I have always wondered the same thing. The reality is, its always been this way and the total subscribers keeps growing. Personally, I dont think the model, as it stands now, is sustainable.

Quote:

Originally Posted by jeffhoward001

So I thought about the licensing issues, but I believe you could get around that programmatically, and some of those issues already exist today. For example my in-dash OEM Dodge player caches an hour of content if I leave a channel paused. If the RIAA really wanted to get nit-picky about royalties, I could technically listen to the same stream a thousand times using the current technology.

SiriusXM does not have the same licensing deals as other radio stations or even Pandora. Their licensing agreement is very specific and the RIAA will get nit-picky. So nit-picky that currently when talk shows are cached for the downloadable on-demand service, they strip the music out of the shows/breaks.

Without two way communication, there is no way for SiriusXM to know how many times you've played a song.

I am almost 100% sure this company will go the way of Palm. Old radio guys are in charge of SiriusXM -- they aren't innovating fast enough in this new world.