Now that the merger is official Sirius and XM are moving quickly to merge their services, and that started today with a totally new channel lineup for both services:
When Sirius XM Satellite Radio subscribers turned on their radios on Wednesday morning (Nov. 12) they were greeted by a message that their channels were being updated. This was the much anticipated day when all of the new channel assignments were revealed, the result of the recent merger of Sirius and XM, which has meant a consolidation of duplicate channels and a slew of layoffs.
Since we’ve been an exclusively XM family, I can’t say how big the changes have been over there, but, judging from the new lineup on XM, I’m liking what I’m seeing.
The music and sports channels I liked are still there, albeit under slightly different names, and there are some pretty cool additions such as the Sinatra Standards channel (Channel 73) and Radio Maragaritaville (Channel 55). The political geek in me is happy that POTUS `08, now simply called POTUS, is still there with some interesting new additions to the lineup.
Even better is the fact that there seem to be a lot more channels available over the online feed, which seems to be where I spend most of my XM listening time these days
And to think that the whole thing might have disappeared if the ninnnys at the FCC had blocked the merger.
H/T: Virginia Virtucon
November 12th, 2008 at 3:05 pm
We’ve been exclusively XM ourselves between my car, my wife’s car and over our DirecTV music channels at home. For the past 4 weeks, though, I’ve had a rental car with Sirius in it. The changes don’t appear to be all that big on the Sirius side, either. Each service saw some channel name changes (I’ll miss the names Fred, Ethel and Lucy on XM, but like that Big Tracks is now Classic Rewind. I’m just glad that the name Watercolors won out over Jazz Cafe.) I still remember when XM’s American Standards was known as Frank’s Place (as in Sinatra), so the change to Siriusly Sinatra is sort of a welcome back.
November 12th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
Riley,
My wife would have been very upset if Watercolors went away.
As for the Sinatra thing, my understand is that XM allowed its contract with the Sinatra estate to expire knowing that they’d eventually get it back when the merger was approved.
I’m not sure I can deal with having two Oprah channels though