Howard Stern Going to Sirius for $500M
$500 million? Man, Sirius is not exactly raking it in right now. It’s a pretty big contract, and needing one million new subscribers just to break even seems rather expensive right now. It’d be ironic if Sirius didn’t survive to the time that Howard Stern is supposed to be on, which is January 2006. And what’s Stern gonna bitch about when he is on satellite radio? Especially if John Kerry wins the election?
The satellite radio race is going to be interesting, as XM is clearly winning handily now. Not that I subscribe to either, but I’d be closer to getting XM rather than Sirius. Also interesting to note what people buying new cars will do, as some cars come with XM built-in and not Sirius. Two fugly antennas on top of cars to get Sirius, too?
I’d rather have seen Howard announce a deal to go to premium cable, like HBO or Showtime, to have an hour or so of an uncensored video show every night (perhaps showing same-day coverage of his radio show even). E!’s Stern show is just lame with all it’s censoring. Though I guess people are paying for pay-per-view rentals of Stern’s uncensored show on Movielink or whatever, seeing it on a laptop or monitor gets to be an eyestrain for an hour or whatnot. You don’t even get to DOWNLOAD the uncensored video footage, you only get to rent it. Ugh. He could alienate more fans by turning his whole website into a pay site, but I don’t exactly see that happening. Hey, as several of my friends do, they just leech the day’s episode on MP3 via the howard-stern Usenet newsgroup, which is probably what I’d do if I wanted to listen to a Stern broadcast on Sirius…
Also, apparently the HowardStern.com Forum doesn’t exactly follow Howard’s mantra of free speech, since you really can’t talk bad about Stern or pretty much anyone the moderators there deem offensive. See screenshot above, click image to enlarge (thanks lowmazda). The post was nuked shortly after posting. TimmyTheCatRules was pretty funny. 
—-
The $500 million, five-year deal, announced by Stern and Sirius on Wednesday, lures Stern away from Viacom Inc.’s (NYSE:VIAB – news) Infinity Broadcasting, and will propel a subscription-based radio business modeled on cable television.