Sunday, February 25, 2007

Satellite Radio Makes The NY Post

OPRAH'S LEMONS MAY MAKE MEL'S LEMONADE
By DAMON BROWN, The New York Post, February 25, 2007

Oprah Winfrey's failure can be one of Mel Karmazin's keys to victory.
The queen of all media caused barely a ripple last fall when XM Satellite Radio announced she would get her own channel, "Oprah and Friends."
In fact, when the star of daytime TV, movies, Broadway and magazines landed on XM in the third quarter of 2006, there was a 54 percent decrease in new subscribers - 285,000 versus 617,152 in the previous year.
Not exactly the 138 percent increase in subscribers that greeted Howard Stern's arrival on Sirius.
On Wednesday, Sirius CEO Karmazin will trudge up to a Capitol Hill hearing to try and convince lawmakers his proposed merger with rival XM isn't anti-competitive. He could trot out the failure of Winfrey, Martha Stewart, and even Nascar to spark a new-subscriber wave as evidence the universe of audio entertainment extends well beyond the country's two ailing satellite radio businesses...read more: here