WorldSpace announces potential decommissioning of satellites - washingtonpost.com

The satellite radio business isn't doing so well. Worldspace, the Sirius XM of Africa and Asia, is in bankruptcy and has announced plans to shut down.

WorldSpace announces potential decommissioning of satellites: "The procedure would involve steering the WorldSpace satellites into a higher orbit, out of the way of others, said Tobias Nassif, vice president of satellite operations and engineering at Intelsat, which would assist WorldSpace."

Part of the problem stems from the fact that there was no "standard" receiver for Satellite radio. Not only were Sirius and XM's systems proprietary, so were Worldspace's. It's a shame there wasn't a single platform that will work with both services.

I'm wondering what next will happen with Sirius XM. Their two satellite systems are incompatible. Will they turn off one to save money? I'm still betting they'll make one exclusively into a mobile video delivery system, and the other will be for audio services; at which point they'll spin off the TV service to Dish or DirecTV.

I'm also curious as to what it costs to run the uplinks and control for those satellites. If someone wanted to run Worldspace as a non-subscription service what would the base transmission operations cost? (I guess I have to look at their SEC filings to find that out. Maybe a better question is: how inexpensively could you operate the system for?)

Another study shows that listening to free internet radio leads to music sales

ArsTechnica, quoting NPD analyst Russ Crupnick speaking at the Digital Music Forum East conference in New York this week:

"NPD noted that free Internet radio is tied to a 41 percent increase in paid downloads too. Not only could it be sating people's interest in hearing songs before they spend money (one of the major reasons to use P2P in the first place), but it's helping users discover new music as well."

That certainly goes along with all the email and comments we receive from listeners about how SomaFM has expanded their musical horizions and led them to buy more music.