On Wed, 27 Oct 2004, zoogang wrote:

> It'll be interesting to see what happens when Stern goes to satellite. It'll
> be even more interesting to see where Sirius is in terms of subscribers when
> he rolls out; right now, Sirius is at around 700,000 or so paying customers,
> and XM is over two million. It remains to be seen whether Stern can sell
> enough boxes to raise Sirius to real contender status in the satellite radio wars.
>
I read somewhere that Sirius claims to need to add a million subscribers
to break even on Stern's contract.  Stern has an estimated 10MM listeners
now, so if they can get 10% of his audience to subscribe. . .

I'm about to take the plunge on satellite radio myself, and though I'm not
a Stern listener, the fact that he's going to be on Sirius assures me that
Sirius isn't going to go kablooey in six months.  Before the Stern
signing, I was uncertain about their future as (as Zoogang notes above)
they've got a much smaller subscriber base than XM.

Jeff Wright *** jaw@apk.net