Sirius and XM Should Offer the Same Channels
By
Staten Island, NY Posted: 3/7/2015 1:00:00 AM
It's been quite a few years since the Sirius and XM merger was approved, but somehow they still haven't quite... merged.
This one is a mystery to me. Before the "Merger" between Sirius and XM, buyers had to decide which service they liked most. Some of the stations were pretty similar, such as the decades channels, and stations covering the major music categories. That was easy.
But things got ugly when they both raced to get exclusive contracts to differentiate each other. Among other things, XM had Major League Baseball, Opie and Anthony, and Oprah Winfrey. Sirius had Howard Stern, Martha Stewart, NBA Basketball and NFL Football. This meant you had to decide which programming you preferred. To make matters worse, in many cases, you didn't actually have a choice because they made exclusive deals with car makers. So even if you wanted XM, you were out of luck if you bought a Ford, which always came with Sirius.
At the time of the merger, I had both radios. I was pretty excited because I assumed I would finally get the discount for having more than one radio, and that I could finally get the same channels on both radios. A few months later, I called and asked about getting the discount, but they said that although they were now one company, they didn't have a way to offer their 2 car discount, unless both radios were the same type. I was assured that eventually they would work things like that out. It's been quite a few years. It never happened. In fact, the prices actually went up.
Another strange thing is that they still don't offer the same channels on both platforms.
It's not just that the channel numbers are different (they often are), but XM radios get some channels that Sirius Radios don't and vice versa.
Technically, if you pay their top-tier price, you get both sets of channels, but if you want to pay the base $14.99 price, you get different channels, depending on which radio you bought. This means that if you have a Sirius radio, you still can't get Major League Baseball, NBA or NHL games, plus a bunch of other channels. XM Radio owners still can't get Howard Stern, NFL or Nascar.
They actually try to hide this fact on their web site(s), but there's a trick to seeing the full picture.
The only way to see this is to clear your browser cookies and go to www.xmradio.com and look at the subscription packages and look at the channel lineup, then using another browser or a private / incognito browser, go to www.Sirius.Com, and look at the same pages. In both cases, the browser will redirect to www.siriusxm.com pages, but the content will be different. Because it saves a cookie, unless you re-clear your cookies, you will see that version of the page regardless of which domain you use in the future.
Basically, they are telling XM owners to fork up an extra $4 per month for Howard Stern., but Sirius owners get his channels for free. They do the reverse for Sirius owners who would like to hear Baseball or NBA coverage, among other things.
Joe Crescenzi, Founder
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