Pocket PC eBooks Watch - eBook and beyond  
 http://cebooks.blogspot.com 

iSputnik
Pay Radio Becomes Personal
THE First Rule of Techno-Pop: Any popular, free medium will eventually be ruined by ads, repetition and lowest-common-denominator junk. It happened to network TV, it happened to the Web and it certainly happened to radio.
The Second Rule: Any free medium that has been ruined by ads will eventually encounter competition from a not-free alternative. It happened with cable TV and, more recently, satellite radio.
It may blow your mind to think that over four million people are now paying $10 or $13 a month just to listen to the radio. (Those are the fees for XM and Sirius Satellite Radio. Discounts are available if you pay in advance, own more than one radio and so on.)
Truth is, though, that what they're getting isn't very much like radio at all. They're getting 65 music channels, free of commercials and endless teenybopper-top-10 repetition, and 40 to 50 talk channels. (The talk channels have some ads, but nowhere near the average of 20 minutes per hour that you'll hear on AM radio.)
Satellite radio subscribers can also glance at the radio itself to see the name of the current song, performer and channel name. The sound is better than FM radio, though not as good as a CD or an iPod. And because the signal emanates from space, you don't lose the station as you drive from city to city. (The exception: the signal fades whenever the radio can't see the sky for more than five seconds, like in a long tunnel. The exception to the exception: in big cities, ground-based repeater antennas keep the signal going even in the concrete canyons.)
Until recently, you could buy satellite receivers in several sizes and shapes, like car dashboard installations, stereo components and boomboxes. But now there's a self-contained, hand-held format that offers a whole new set of possibilities.

posted by Jerry permanent link