Just days after announcing that it had hit the 6 million subscriber mark, Sirius Satellite Radio has paid Howard Stern $83 million in stock after the subscriber numbers well exceeded estimates for year-end 2006.
As a Sirius subscriber, I’m really not surprised to see the growth in the space, for them or XM. They’ve definitely proven that people will pay for something if they see some real value to it - irrelevant of the companies “making money” yet or not, they definitely have some part of the right idea, especially when it comes to content sans advertising. Additionally, I’ve gone from seeing one friend who works for Clear Channel go from blowing off the satellite space to realizing that it wasn’t going away anytime soon in less than 18 months.
Merger or not between the duopoly, I think that satellite will be around to stay for quite some time. While many believe (I’m pretty much one of them) that IP-based content delivery will end up being how we receive our radio, etc., in our vehicles and at home (a lot of us do that already), I’m one to believe that the space could be “led” by Sirius and XM, especially as they’ve already set up pretty significant Web presences and ability to listen to the same content they delivery via satellite.
1 response so far ↓
1 notoriousmig // Jan 13, 2007 at 11:28 am
Who are they including in their subscriber numbers? Are they all paying subscribers?