Fans put satellite radio on cellphones, draws fire
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Fans of U.S. satellite radio have been waiting eagerly for nearly a year to get XM or Sirius on to their cell phones. — But as the two satellite radio providers carefully ponder their mobile strategies and chew …
Context & Ripple Effects
The demand side of this story has been building for months: CNN's November 2005 piece on sports coverage you could carry in your pocket captured why listeners wanted Howard Stern-style and play-by-play audio untethered from car dashboards, and fans have now waited nearly a year for XM or Sirius to deliver it on a handset.
What changed this week is that impatient listeners stopped waiting — confirmed reports show fans putting both XM and Sirius feeds onto cellphones ahead of any official product, and the move is drawing fire from critics even as both providers are only rumored to be carefully weighing their mobile strategies.
First-order effects
- XM and Sirius now have unauthorized cellphone distribution of their subscriptions live in the wild before either has shipped an official mobile offering, forcing them to decide whether to sanction, monetize, or suppress the fan-built route.
- Subscribers gain a workaround that makes the handset a listening device today, undercutting the case for buying dedicated portable satellite receivers.
Second-order effects
- Carriers and handset makers become the chokepoint: whichever provider signs the first official mobile deal converts the fan workaround's proof of demand into an exclusive distribution advantage over its rival.
- Consumer-electronics partners selling dedicated satellite radios face a pricing squeeze if phones deliver the same subscription without extra hardware.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, competition between XM and Sirius shifts from satellites and receivers to signal licensing — who controls rebroadcast rights onto cellular networks — making the phone, not the dish-fed receiver, the industry's primary endpoint.
The trend: Subscription radio is migrating from purpose-built satellite hardware toward the cellphone as its main delivery device, with rights licensing rather than orbit determining who wins.