Twelve Black Code Monkeys

XM, the more successful of the two satellite radio companies that began transmitting a couple of years ago, has decided to expand its reach to internet broadcasting. I used to own an XM radio, and while I enjoyed the better-than-FM quality of XM, and the freedom to keep listening to my favorite station no matter where I was (as long as I was outside that is), I eventually decided to get rid of it because I didn’t feel like I was using it enough to justify the $11/month they charge. I can certainly see it being worth that much or more for people who listen to the radio more, but for the most part I tend to listen to audio books or NPR, and XM does not carry NPR (Sirius, XM’s competitor, carries a very limited slate of second-tier NPR shows).

This new method of broadcasting I’m not so sure about. I’ve never really been that into internet radio, believe it or not. Even with a DSL connection at home, streaming audio to where it’s actually somewhat equivalent to FM quality usually slows down everything else. Doing anything else on the computer that requires uploading or downloading large files makes the connection flakey. Aside from this, I live an area that has two NPR stations, and of course a fair variety of musical genres to pick from, although I can see where having a college radio station or a station that played a more eclectic mix of genres (zydeco, Caribbean, African, Brazilian, etc) would be nice. The nice thing about the XM radio I owned, the Delphi SkyFi, was that I could use it in the car, then unplug it and hook it up to a boom box made specifically for it in the office or at home. It was “portable!” Since then Delphi has come out with other modular XM radio devices that don’t even require a proprietary boom box. Maybe once Wimax enables constant 70mbps connections to the internet for any enabled mobile phone the internet radio broadcasts may finally become truly portable (at the huge expense of these phones’ battery life!), but until then it’s simply another way to listen to the radio when one has a higher-speed connection. If XM simply offers this as an added feature to current XM subscribers, great! Then they won’t have to deal with modular devices like the SkyFi. I supposed it’s also a remedy for those who don’t want to spend $100 or more on a satellite radio itself (let alone installation fees for your car, etc.), but still a nice array of channels to listen to at the office. Then again, aren’t there already a whole bunch of completely free internet radio channels???