Sirius Getting Serious

Number 2 satellite radio company Sirius has had a good year and is talking big:

Sirius Satellite Radio CEO Joseph Clayton told stockholders on Tuesday the company’s plans include a video service, wearable radios, and the signing of a top shock jock such as Howard Stern.

“Do we want Opie & Anthony? Do we want Mancow? Do we want Howard Stern?” Clayton said, referring to some of the most popular, though controversial, morning radio personalities. “We’re talking to all of them.”

Shock Jocks like Howard Stern have begun to talk about satellite radio as a potential outlet, given a regulatory push against broadcasts that are deemed indecent. None of the top names have yet moved over to satellite. [Reuters]

I have been saying this is the solution for the shock jocks since the post-Super Bowl crackdown began: get these popular but vile rimjobs off the public airwaves and onto satellite where they can do whatever the hell they want and only bother those who want to be bothered with their antics.

Clayton faced a much different audience in the annual meeting of shareholders on Tuesday than last fall when Sirius’ stock price was trading well below $3 and shareholders were angry and vocal.

This time Clayton mostly basked in praise from the group, but cautioned that the company may never catch market leader XM Satellite Radio in subscriptions, but could, like EchoStar’s Dish Network in satellite TV, become a profitable number two.

He reiterated the company’s forecast for the year, saying Sirius would reach 1 million subscriptions and $75 million in revenue by year-end.

….The company’s third generation of devices, due to market in the fall of 2005, will include much smaller, wearable radios, due to miniaturization achieved by chip supplier STMicroelectronics .

Clayton said the company would introduce at least four but possibly as many as eight video channels targeted at children riding in the back seats of cars.

One million cars were sold with video equipment in the back seats in 2003 and 4 million are expected to be sold in 2004, he said.

“We are being pressed hard by our car partners to move into video,” Clayton told Reuters.

And this is gold. We drove over 1,000 miles in two days each way between Cleveland and Orlando on our vacation and the trip back was made vastly more palatable for the 4 year-old (and even the 5 month-old, to a certain extent) by having a functioning VCR/TV combo in the back of the old minivan (with the second row seat removed) to go with the little miss’s box o videos she brought along for the trip.

See, on the way down we had the wrong DC to AC inverter (needed 125 continuous watts, only had 110) and didn’t have time to stop on the way (left Thursday at 4pm, had to be in Orlando by Friday evening) and try to figure out what the hell was wrong with the damn thing and why it just sat there inert as we tooled down the highway instead of basking the back of the vehicle in the warm, otherworldly glow of Sponge Bob, Fairly Odd Parents, Rugrats and Wild Thornberrys Go Wild, Schoolhouse Rock, Care Bears, and the like.

So she got pretty bored on the way down, and boredom leads to crankiness and noises loud enough to wake up the sleeping baby and endless requests for treats and the like, none of which was helped by the TWO-GODDAMNED-HOUR, STOPPED-DEAD-ON-THE-HIGHWAY-LIKE-A-FUCKING-LONG-NARROW-PARKING-LOT accident we had to wait for the road-destruction clowns to clear in western Virginia, setting us even farther back in our schedule, and fraying frayed nerves past the human frayation point.

Needless to say, the ride back was much better after a week of frolicking in the sun and fun of central Florida,

the VRC/TV combo purring sweetly behind me, even the 850 miles we drove on Saturday to get back home after stopping early on Friday to catch a little final sand and surf action on lovely Jeckyll Island in Georgia,

where the flat alabaster sand along the gentle sea stretched to the horizon in either direction in the early-evening light, and where the stars erupted in brazen effulgence upon nightfall like a magical realist planetarium.

So, Sirius having the right idea with the video channels for the kids in the back seat of the car is the point I am trying to illustrate.