SiriusXM Price Increase June 30, 2015

[TNGTony]

I just got this e-mail:
Funny thing is I cancelled my service before the free trial was completed. Couldn't stand the crappy sound quality.

To Our Valued Customers:

Important Notice: Our records show you have ordered or purchased a subscription that will start when your trial ends. We are writing to inform you of a pricing adjustment to your package. Effective June 30, 2015, the standard monthly rate for primary and additional radios on the same account with All Access, Premier, Mostly Music, and News, Sports & Talk packages* will increase by $1.00 per month. Effective this same date, the renewal price for primary radios and additional radios on the same account with All Access and Premier packages* will be based on the monthly standard rate multiplied by the number of months for the associated plan. This pricing change will apply after your first billing period following your trial — see the examples below. Please visit siriusxm.com/2015rates for more information.

Examples:
» If you chose a monthly billing plan to follow your trial, the first month will not be impacted by the adjustment. The new rates will apply to the second and subsequent months of your plan.

» If you chose a quarterly billing plan to follow your trial, the first three months of your service will be at the current rates. You will not be billed at the new rate until your plan bills again (after the first three months).

You expect SiriusXM® to provide the best in audio entertainment and in the past several years, we've focused on expanding our programming to deliver even more A-list talent, variety and channels you won't hear anywhere else. Our subscription packages offer more and better value to our listeners today than ever before, but in order to keep delivering the best possible experience there will be a monthly rate adjustment. Rest assured that even though this is the first monthly rate change for the All Access and Mostly Music packages since first offered in 2011 and 2008, respectively, this decision comes only after thorough deliberation.

We understand you listen to SiriusXM for the variety of premium content available — giving you an incredible value with commercial-free music, plus sports, news, comedy, talk, entertainment and more. That's why we stay focused on delivering outstanding programming that gets better and more exciting every day. Recent additions to our lineup include Ellen DeGeneres, Stephen A. Smith, Hoda Kotb, Jenny McCarthy, Andy Cohen, Jeff Foxworthy, Larry the Cable Guy, NBC Nightly News and Meet the Press. Plus we launched new shows on PGA TOUR® Radio and new channels including Pitbull's Globalization Channel, Bleacher Report Radio, The YouTube 15 and SiriusXM Insight.

Only SiriusXM delivers unique, exclusive programming you can't hear anywhere else — the Foo Fighters New York City concert, Barbra Streisand's exclusive channel, AC/DC Radio, Skrillex's private concert and more. Our Town Hall series lets listeners like you ask questions to iconic musicians and celebrities like Carlos Santana, Taylor Swift, Tim McGraw, Chris Rock, and legendary golfer Gary Player.

And the best is yet to come. We are building an exciting future that includes even more exclusive subscriber benefits and greater flexibility in the way you can listen to SiriusXM. Be sure to take advantage of all the benefits available to you to get the most from SiriusXM, including special invitations and complimentary tickets to exclusive performances, concerts, and sporting events near you, by visiting siriusxm.com/whatilike.

On behalf of everyone at SiriusXM, thank you for your loyalty, and for being a SiriusXM listener.
*Family Friendly packages included.

 

[TNGTony]

From their web site:
Important Notice: Effective June 30, 2015, the standard monthly rate for primary and additional radios on the same account with All Access, Premier, Mostly Music, and News, Sports & Talk packages* will increase by $1.00 per month. Effective this same date for All Access and Premier packages*, renewal pricing for primary radios and additional radios on the same account will be based on the monthly standard rate multiplied by the number of months for the associated plan. For more information please refer to the links to the right on this page.

 

[goaliebob99]

Is the service getting any better.. Am I getting 7.1 surround sound quality music? I think its not even CD quality at times. I dont see myself renewing unless they keep rolling the 25 dollar for 6 month promos.

 

[KAB]

I've got one more month of free trial that came with new car. NOT going to continue due to poor sound quality. Too bad, cause I do like the music they play.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

If the audio from the satellite was even 32k I would be surprised.

 

[TheKrell]

I let my trial lapse because of crappy audio quality. But then I grew weak and went for their $20 for 5 month deal. I wouldn't mind if it went up to $21. But it's not worth half of the normal price, so I may go without again in 4 months.

 

[goaliebob99]

If the audio from the satellite was even 32k I would be surprised.

From what I am told its an AAC stream.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Yes XM is using AAC+.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XM_Satellite_Radio

They don't have much spectrum. only 12.5 Mhz.

 

[TheKrell]

They don't have much spectrum. only 12.5 Mhz.

How much for Sirius? I don't see their codec listed on their Wikipedia entry. But they do say that radios combine the signal from 3 sources: satellite, satellite, and terrestrial, with one of them leading the others by 4 seconds to reduce or eliminate dropouts e.g. from driving under a bridge.

The Sirius signal is separated into three carriers, one each for the two satellites, and the third for the terrestrial repeater network where available. Sirius receivers decode all three 4 MHz carrier signals at once to achieve signal diversity. This is in contrast to XM which uses six carriers and decodes three 2 MHz carriers to economize on receiver power consumption and complexity at the cost of channel-changing speed. There is an intentional four-second delay between the two satellite carrier signals. This enables the receiver to maintain a large buffer of the audio stream, which, along with forward error correction, helps keep the audio playing in the event that the signal is temporarily lost, such as when driving under an overpass or otherwise losing line-of-sight of any of the satellites or ground repeater stations.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

The problem with Sirius is their radio was hard coded with the audio codec, while XM Radios could have their audio codec updated and changed with a software update via Satellite. Which is why a Sirius Radio sounds a lot different then a XM radio.

 

[jegrant]

Not only that, XM included the AMBE(R) low bit rate codec (used for Traffic/Weather channels and Canada 360/AMI) in their radios, which allows them to provide those channels at a great bandwidth savings compared to Sirius. XM originally had one city per channel, due to the low bandwidth used by each. To stay on topic, I think the price increase is ridiculous. I'll stay with them as long as they can keep providing cheap promo rates. I bought the $50 for 6 months All Access promo and am now regretting it, because although they have a great streaming service when it works, it's been down for weeks and they seem somewhat aware of it but not particularly concerned. It's certainly not worth $15/mo on its own.

Ellen DeGeneres, Stephen A. Smith, Hoda Kotb, Jenny McCarthy, Andy Cohen, Jeff Foxworthy, Larry the Cable Guy, NBC Nightly News and Meet the Press. Plus we launched new shows on PGA TOUR® Radio and new channels including Pitbull's Globalization Channel, Bleacher Report Radio, The YouTube 15 and SiriusXM Insight.​

Of these "new" programming items:
Ellen was already on XM years ago, and is just a TV simulcast. That's hardly original content and hardly represents any investment by SXM.
Jeff & Larry were already on SXM and merely rebranded their existing channel.
NBC Nightly & MTP are more TV simulcasts.
Pitbull & Andy Cohen have yet to be heard.
SXM Insight is a pale imitation of XMPR.

I will say I do like the YouTube 15, if only because they play music of types that hasn't been heard since U-Pop left XM.
If they want to fix Public Radio on SXM, start by getting someone at NPR to actually answer an email about their channel. And maybe update the schedule to remove cancelled shows, and add more unique programming and lower the frequency of same day repeats. Now that SXM is using less Public Radio content, NPR Now should be able to pick it up.

 

[oldengineer]

I have a $26 subscription to the Select pkg for 6 months, expiring Aug 16. I'll renew at that price or cancel. About the only stations we listen to are 40s on 4, 50s on 5 and The Blend. They pissed me off when they moved 40s on 4 to ch 74 because it messed up my buttons and tuner 'cause now when I want to switch from 40s to 50s and push up 1 channel I get some opera crap.

 

[lparsons21]

I took the one year $89 deal today, call the rest of the money I left on the table an aggravation charge!

 

[Mr Tony]

I havent had Sirus in a few years but when I had my dads truck for a couple weeks (mine was in the shop) I listened to it
Same songs I noticed. I listened to a few of the stations.

On a funny note my dad came to get his truck and I forgot to switch the station from Lithium. He turns on the truck and "Dragula" comes blaring across the speakers

 

[NGeorge]

I was one of the very first Sirius subscribers (4 digit account number) in 2003 and agree with the previous posts above -- the audio quality has gone to complete sh*t over the years. I've followed the industry a good bit, so here's some insights...

As for the codec used, Sirius uses the proprietary PAC codec created by Agere Systems -- it's similar to what Ibiquity uses for terrestrial HD Radio, but is not exactly the same since iBiquity holds a number of patents. Due to the constantly moving satellites--Sirius satellites are in a polar orbit and move in a figure 8 vs. XM which has satellites stationary at 85* and 115* WL just like the TV providers--Sirius chipsets are much more complex -- there's a lot of crazy math involved to ensure seamless handoffs and timing for the realtime decoding between a constantly moving vehicle and moving satellite. The first version of the chipsets used 8 different chips, created quite a heat load, and is the reason that Sirius never got to the point of such tiny portable units as XM (they did get it down to 2 chips, but even so it was inconsistent and had reception issues -- see the Sirius Stiletto)--that said, Sirius only needed a couple hundred repeaters, whereas XM was in the thousands at their peak: Sirius satellites sit between 60* and 90* above you depending on the time of day, while XM sits in the same position closer to 30-50* depending on where you are.

Needless to say, Sirius legacy units get much better recpetion... initially they sounded better too. The issue with this complexity and better reception is that these radios were pretty much "frozen" -- while XM could just do a software flash, Sirius radios were hard coded... they never wanted to do a mass swap, so they pretty much were stuck, even when AAC+ came out and would have allowed more channels. So Sirius crammed in more and more channels to compete--and the audio suffered horribly. Initially their service was designed for 80 channels.... when they very first launched, it sounded AWESOME.

Now that they are merged, and have been for years, they NEED to cut their losses to one of these systems (unfortunately it will probably be Sirius -- which has better reception, and now with new technology could support an AAC+ type codec while maintaining the moving satellites), and use both bands to get 25 Mhz. of spectrum... but that will require making millions of radios obsolete on one of the sides and doing a mass swap... I just don't see it happening... it will probably have to happen when the satellites start failing and they have to "pick a side" -- right now there is one or two models of "dual radios" that can get both services -- but all they do is pick up duplicate channels -- and basically have both chipsets... one chipset that picks up one technology that uses both bands, is what needs to eventually happen -- and I still don't know how they plan on pulling this off...

Nat

 

[MikeD-C05]

I cancelled years ago when they did their first increase after the merger of the two companies. I still have XM in my car , only by taking their $5.00 for 5 months promos. I would never have it for full price -especially after their price hikes and the poorer sound.

 

[TheKrell]

only by taking their $5.00 for 5 months promos

Say what? My best promo was $20 for 5 months, or $4/mo. The $25 for 6 month deal is slightly worse at $4.17/mo. I want your deal ($1/mo).

 

[Blindowl1234]

Well when my 5 for $20 expires again in August I'm thinking I'm dropping them for good. I've got a USB port in the car and its got bluetooth. I'll stream whatever via my phone.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

I was going to tell you to subscribe to online only and listen via Bluetooth, but I just looked and the Internet service which use to be $6 is now $15 a month. OUCH! Glad I got lifetime service both via Satellite and Online.

 

[meldar_b]

I dropped my SiriusXM service last year due to billing problems, after being with XM radio since November 13 2001 at 3 pm est. I got tired of being offered one thing and getting billed for something else it was time to leave. March has been a year since dropping the service I do not miss satellite radio with its limited song choices low sound quality. With all the choice's available on the internet now for FREE (most of them) why would anybody other than cross road truckers what to pay for their crappy service.