The only two providers of satellite radio in North America, XM and Sirius, will merge into one company, according to reports today.
I wonder if this will be as detrimental as the rise of Clear Channel was to terrestrial radio; Clear Channel homogenized programming across all the stations it bought, and its stations lack originality (i.e. too many stations named "Star" or "Kiss").
At least I hope the combined company will continue to provide quality programming as a nice, premium alternative to terrestrial radio. In addition, the combined programming better be available on both XM hardware and Sirius hardware, which are, for now, incompatible. If I can listen to XM programming like Major League Baseball and Air America Radio on my Sirius-equipped cars, that'll be a good outcome of this merger. (I'm kinda bummed right now that Sirius dropped C-SPAN from its lineup...)
MSNBC
