SEATTLE -– Last weekend, while Mir slowly fell toward the earth, another piece of hardware joined the crowded skies in a low-earth orbit, destined to become the first radio station in outer space.
"Rock," a five-ton Boeing 702 satellite hauling 3,000 watts of radio power in a pair of transponders, is the biggest communications satellite yet -– but that is only half the story. In May it'll be joined by its twin, "Roll." And by summer, the two will be beaming back 100 channels of music, sports, talk and other programming via digital satellite radio.
Beginning this summer, people in Butte, Montana, will be able to tune in hip-hop or reggae and long-haul truckers will have the option of listening to Beethoven, Basie or the Beastie Boys from one end of the continent to the other without touching a dial.
XM Radio of Washington, D.C. -- one of two companies licensed by the FCC to provide direct digital radio from space -- plans to be all over the boards, filling channels with a variety of music formats from alternative rock to show tunes.
Among the broadcasting partners signed on for the ride are the BBC World Service, USA Today, NASCAR, Christian broadcaster Salem Communications and ASIAONE, which will provide general-interest programming on two channels, in Mandarin and Hindi.
Recognizing the rising number of Latino listeners, XM has contracted with Hispanic Broadcasting Corporation to create five Spanish-language music formats: Caribbean, Regional Mexican, Soft Adult Contemporary, Tejano and Rock en Español. Radio One, the largest radio network targeted at African-Americans, is providing five channels of Talk, Gospel, Urban Mix, Hip-Hop and Urban Top 40.
It remains to be seen whether anyone will actually be out there listening.
To get all this, listeners will have to buy satellite-ready radios and pay a monthly subscription fee, currently set at $9.95. Pioneer and several other electronics companies are marketing home and portable models, which began showing up on store shelves earlier this year, and General Motors will begin offering the XM Radio receivers as an option in their new cars.
"We'll see if the $9.95 a month or whatever it might be will be enough for people to really tune in and listen to it, in the short term," said Dan Sheppard, president of AudioRamp, an Internet radio company in Irvine, California.
"If you look at stats for why people listen to local radio, it's for the local color -- it's for the local information and so on, and so forth. So, it's not like you pop a CD in and listen to some music. I think in the long term -- three, four, five years from now -- it will be built into your car, you won't need a special stereo, it'll be tied into your lease amount, so it will just be there."
Aram Sinnreich, a senior analyst with Jupiter Media Metrix, said he is "bearish on satellite radio." He predicted that the medium was not likely to draw more than 3 million listeners, a number he said would be inadequate to justify the investment in satellites and other technology.
He likened satellite radio to cable radio, another emerging medium which has thus far failed to capture a significant audience nationwide. While acknowledging it could always switch from subscriptions to a commercial model, Sinnreich said the major selling point satellite radio broadcasters are relying on is the medium's absence of commercials.
Bob Ohlweiler, senior VP for business development at MusicMatch, a software company providing MP3 downloads and players, believes there is a future for satellite radio, though he agrees it will eventually be overtaken by wireless streaming media over the Internet.
"Wireless Internet radio gives all the things that XM is going to give, plus the interactivity," he said. "Digital satellite radio will have to morph eventually into interactive radio."
He feels this will be possible because "it doesn't take a lot of information to request a level of interactivity (even though) there is a lot of data coming back down to provide it."
