The biggest concern I have about buying a satellite radio stems from the fact that I once owned a Betamax. (It really WAS the better system.) Now we have competing systems with incompatible hardware again, except this time it’s not obvious why.
Beta and VHS obviously used different media and were totally incompatible. Why can’t a manufacturer build a radio that receives both bands? Do they use different technologies? Do the two content providers contractually disallow manufacturers from making their units compatible with the other. Are they afraid there would be a bidding war for services if consumers could switch back and forth from one provider to the other?
I would buy one if I could be reasonably sure my player wouldn’t go the way of the 8-track or Laserdisc.
If you bought a Sirius player and then decided you didn’t like the Sirius stations, if it was as simple as changing your subscription - you’d probably do it. But since it requires you to buy an XM receiver and change subscription then you’re less likely to do it.
Unlike Beta/VHS or Sirius/XM the basic technologies for AM/FM are not proprietary. There are specific patents for certain ways of doing anything but nothing that prevents any manufacturer from making either type of reciever. They are in fact “incompatible” in that there is different circuitry for each, essentially two different recievers though a few components may be used in common. This isn’t obvious unless you start looking at schematics and functional diagrams. Likewise it may not be technologiccaly impossible to built a Sirisus/XM reciever but the patent holders for each would probably not allow something like that to happen.
Sirius and XM do use incompatible technologies. You could use the same antenna, LCD, and keypad, but AFAIK they use different frequencies (both for satellites and terrestrial repeaters), different encryption, different audio codecs, different methods of combining multiple audio streams into one signal, etc.
That doesn’t mean you couldn’t build a receiver to work with both systems, but it would need to duplicate all those circuits.
However, I believe there are head units (including some factory-installed head units) that will work with either a Sirius tuner or an XM tuner. This is because all the complicated stuff is inside the tuner, so the head unit only needs to know how to change the channel, read the song name, and play the decrypted audio from both tuners. Presumably it wouldn’t be much harder to make a head unit that could use both tuners at the same time.
That FAQ is dated April 2000. It seems to be accurate, though. There are a lot of articles from February 2000 about the plans for a unified standard, including this joint press release. This page says the standard was developed in response to an FCC mandate. However, nearly 5 years later, you still can’t buy a tuner that will receive both Sirius and XM.
I don’t think so. A unified standard would do more good than harm, as mentioned in the press release:
Also, I don’t know how true this is anymore, but Sirius and XM were initially paying big subsidies to the hardware manufacturers so that tuners would be affordable for customers. (Perhaps those are the “subscriber acquisition costs”.) If both tuner designs were combined into one product, the higher volume would lower the per-unit cost of each tuner, thus lowering the subsidies needed to keep tuner prices low.
Well IIRC DirecTV bought out one of their competitors (I think Primestar?) and IIRC the consumer didn’t suffer any financial loss due to the dish being changed (and IIRC some of them were even compatible.) I don’t see why a radio satellite receiver would be much different.