A National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) hired engineer rained hard this week on the parade of pro-XM/Sirius merger public statements, reminding the Federal Communications Commission that XM and Sirius receivers cannot access each other's signals.
"Thus, as is true today, if the proposed merger of XM and Sirius were consummated, consumers would still need to purchase a new interoperable receiver in order to receive the signals of both providers," wrote the consultant in a filing submitted to the FCC on June 27th.
And it does not appear that they will be able to soon, Dennis Wallace of the consulting firm Meintel, Sgrignoli, and Wallace observed. The differences in the two satellite radio systems would make such an interoperable receiver complicated and costly, explaining why the device is "nowhere in sight."
Orbits and data
FCC rules require all Digital Audio Radio Satellite broadcasters to offer interoperable services, but XM and Sirius employ starkly unsimilar transmission methods, according to the NAB commissioned filing. Sirius has three satellites which employ a Highly-Inclined Elliptical Orbit configuration. XM has two which use a Geostationary configuration.
They also broadcast using different data speeds, data carrying capacities, and data compression/decompression systems.
And so Wallace's comments take to task Sirius CEO Mel Karmazin's claim that if the XM/Sirius merger were approved by the FCC, the new entity would "offer consumers a much more attractive choice: the best of each service on one radio at a price well below the cost of the two services today."
"This statement allows an interpretation that the current radio used by an XM or Sirius subscriber would be sufficient to receive both signals," Wallace argues. "As explained herein, this is not the case."
The NAB filing also contends that both satellite services have reached their limit in terms of "program capacity."
"The data capacities of both the XM and Sirius systems are filled with programming and significant spare capacity is not available," the filing contends. "Expanding the number of program offerings on the XM or Sirius platforms through more aggressive digital compression is possible but would result in unacceptable degradation of audio quality."
The NAB has long opposed the proposed merger of XM and Sirius, going so far as to create its own Web site against the move.
But the broadcasting trade group is not the only party to raise the inoperability issue. On June 18th, 72 members of Congress, led by Representative James Sensenbrenner, Republican of Wisconsin, filed a three page statement against the merger.
"There is scant evidence that a merger would produce any cost savings that a combined Sirius/XM potentially might pass on to subscribers," the signers wrote. " . . . Sirius and XM would face protracted obstacles to combining their platforms because they use different radio encoding technologies."
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