American Antitrust Institute to DOJ: Block XM-Sirius merger

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Force Commander
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American Antitrust Institute to DOJ: Block XM-Sirius merger

Post by Force Commander »

"We are the CC Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your broadcast stations. We will add your biological and creative distinctiveness to our own. Your broadcast personality will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile."
AmpedNow
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Post by AmpedNow »

We just passed the one year mark since the merger proposal... This is beyond the point of ridiculousness already.
Broadcasters have been pushing hard against the merger, arguing that satellite radio competes with them for local ad dollars but they cannot compete with it as a national service. The combination would be an unfair "merger to monopoly," they argued.
How exactly do they directly compete for local radio's ad dollars? Aside from the fact that they are both radio, the similarities stop there.

Second, this cat is already out of the bag. Hoping for the bankruptcy of satellite radio does not mean that all of the displaced audience will come back to local radio. It's the industry's own fault they are in this mess.

And finally, I find it totally hypocritical that the NAB and iBuiquity are demanding HD chips piggyback on all new satellite radios... They want a free ride on all the money and hard work that XM and Sirius has done to get to this point. The equivalent of a corporate welfare handout.

They need to drop this "entitlement" mentality. Radio is not entitled to anything.

Which is better: having a smaller, active, happy audience who is listening because they really like the on-air product, even though they have somewhere else to go? Or having a larger, passive, disgruntled audience who is only listening because they have nowhere else to go?

Sadly, the answer seems pretty apparent...
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