Tuesday, October 17, 2006
How Many Channels?
October 17, 2006
We have all seen that XM Satellite Radio has now dropped the tag line "The Most Commercial Free Music". This is likely because Sirius added Canadian channels to the U.S. service and both companies now can claim 69 commercial free music channels.
That now leaves us with the comparison of how many channels there are on each service. XM claims 172 channels and Sirius claims 133 channels. On the face of things it would appear that XM has 39 more channels than Sirius. What exactly are those 39 channels?
Part Time Play By Play Baseball Channels---------14
Part Time Spanish Play By Play Baseball Channel--01
Part Time College Sports Play By Play Channels---10
Part Time Hockey Channels-----------------------05
Additional Traffic Channels------------------------09
TOTAL-------------------------------------------39There is a differing philosophy between XM and Sirius. Sirius handles Sports Play by Play by utilizing the existing bandwidth dedicated to sports channels, and also preempts some programming to facilitate games. XM dedicates channel designations to Play by Play. Most of the time there is nothing on these channels other than a message that there is currently no game being played.
XM dedicates 21 channels to service facilitate traffic in 21 U.S. cities. Most cities have a dedicated channel. Sirius doubles up most cities and covers 20 U.S. cities and Canada with 12 channels.
The services basically put out every similar offerings. They simply have different ways of marketing, and different ways of using their bandwidth. The more bandwidth a channel has dedicated to it the better the sound quality is. Every channel you add creates a demand on your bandwidth. Granted, the announcements that no game is being played do not carry much demand, but when games are being played, the bandwidth requirements are likely more heavy.
Both Sirius and XM are planning compression methods that will allow the services to squeeze more use out of their assigned bandwidth.
There you have it......The skinny on the channel counts.
10/17/2006 10:10:00 PM
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