Nathan's Occasional Blog

It’s only a matter of time before advertising finds its way onto the rest of XM Satellite Radio’s channels, and this Google deal only makes it worse.

But what really gets me is that XP purports to be “CD quality” sound – BULL HONKEY!  We’ve got XM in a factory Honda unit and an add-in SkyFi2 and both have the same issues:

• We get numerous dropouts of signal on our commute … which is 80% on I-90, a major and very wide thoroughfare east of Seattle.  Certain bridges, some hills, a cement wall, and even trees will kill the radio feed.
• I think even my 16 month old daughter can tell that the XM feeds are heavily compressed.  It’s way too noticable for my ear and quite distracting.  Being a drummer I tend to hear the nuances of the percussion tracks on a song, and the higher frequencies that cymbals generate are the very ones XM compresses the hell out of.
• For two vehicles we’re paying about $20/mo. for crappy radio that cuts out.

Done.  I’ll be calling XM customer service later this evening to cancel.  Enough is enough.  If they put a satellite over the west coast (so the signal is higher than 15–20 degrees above the horizon to the south east) and double their “premium music” streams from 32kbps to 64kbps, I might reconsider.

Until then we’ll be spending our $20 each month on a new CD for our massive collection.

I just came across a post on Bink talking about the newest Neilson//NetRatings (for May 2006).  Bink points out that Google replaced MSN.com as the third most visited site online.  Interested, I decided to skim the report and I found bigger news than that!  Facts and my comments below:

• 72% of home Internet use in May in the US was over broadband.  WOW!
• An average visitor to an AOL website spends over 6 hours on that media property each month.  What’s interesting here is that AOL is going to give their content away free if you have a broadband connection, which means they’re transitioing from a service provider model to an advertising revenue model.
• An average visitor to a Google online property spent 53 minutes on a Google site in May.  AOL might actually have a shot at Google in advertising since they are already providing more attractive content (by a factor of 6X).  BUT Google has done an excellent job in getting AdSense on non-Google sites.  Maybe AOL should offer the same service?
• 1/3 of the US population has broadband at home (102M of 300M).
• Broadband users (now the majority) are early adopters of new online tools like RSS and blogging.