Alternative to Sirius/XM

[theebdk]

I have had it with Sirius/XM from lousy channel changes to the recent price increase. But I really do enjoy several components of the service. I am wondering if there are alternatives besides local radio. Let me describe what I like and a little about my situation and if anyone can suggest some alternatives I would appreciate that.

My wife and I both have sat. radios in our cars. My car is an older Infiniti without the fancy MP3 plugins or anything like that. My wife drives a newer SUV with the fancy MP3 plugins. I travel alot and enjoy streaming the channels in the evening from my hotel room. Have the Verizon high speed anywhere access. My wife also owns the new Blackberry Storm, the touchscreen one, and I have the Blackberry world edition.

As far as the content that we enjoy includes various music (hard rock, reggae, old school rap), Disney channel, conservative talk, the traffic from different cities when we travel, and Fox news.

Does anyone have any suggestions that would stream on those various devices or enable a similar service? Is HD radio the way to go? What internet services are good and low cost? Thanks for the input and I am sure other would appreciate this discussion.

 

[minorthr]

Slacker for music....You can buy a stand alone player or download the app to the Blackberry. The music service itself is free. However the free service is limited to only letting you skip 6 songs an hour which shouldn't be a big deal for most people. And there is like one 30 second commercial an hour. There is a $4 a month paid service that gives you unlimited skips and no commercials. They also have a few kids channels as well, but I havent really listened to them.

As far as talk goes your probably better just listening to AM for free.

 

[Max931]

What I do is listen to i tunes on line. Plus you can stream on AOL radio for free. They now have powered with CBS radio and they have some great music channels more choices than Sirius Xm. If you want to listen to fox news on line here is there link FoxNews Radio Slacker is a good one as well but I would reccomend Aol radio. I have my computer at home set up as a home stereo and it's sound great. Max.

 

[navychop]

Download music & podcasts to an iPod or iPhone.

 

[satjay]

As mentioned above Slacker is good, as well as pandora radio

 

[JonE]

I have an iPhone with Slacker, Pandora, Last.FM, AOL Radio, iheartradio, and a few other radio apps on there. That's plenty for music and there are quite a few talk stations AOL iHeart and Flycast which fill the bill. I missed BBC World Service and C-Span Radio since I left XM, but those are on Flycast. Between those, a playlist of select stuff from my collection, and podcasts, I'm never at a loss for something to listen to.

 

[dsclark]

I have an iPhone with Slacker, Pandora, Last.FM, AOL Radio, iheartradio, and a few other radio apps on there. That's plenty for music and there are quite a few talk stations AOL iHeart and Flycast which fill the bill. I missed BBC World Service and C-Span Radio since I left XM, but those are on Flycast. Between those, a playlist of select stuff from my collection, and podcasts, I'm never at a loss for something to listen to.

I got the exact same stuff on my Ipod! I find myself listening to Pandora the most, but if I click past 6 songs within one hour and still not like what I hear, I go to Slacker. I get some talk and Fox news off AOL ( I think that is the one).
It is really fun to play around with the different stations. There are some jamaican stations that I tuned into and they had jamaican doctor taking questions about menopause- it was kind of funny! The doctor would say "Der tings that make the menopause werse, like obeesity!
The only thing I miss from XM is Deep Tracks' Buried Treasures and CNN's Lou Dobbs.

 

[JonE]

I got the exact same stuff on my Ipod! I find myself listening to Pandora the most, but if I click past 6 songs within one hour and still not like what I hear, I go to Slacker. I get some talk and Fox news off AOL ( I think that is the one).
It is really fun to play around with the different stations. There are some jamaican stations that I tuned into and they had jamaican doctor taking questions about menopause- it was kind of funny! The doctor would say "Der tings that make the menopause werse, like obeesity!
The only thing I miss from XM is Deep Tracks' Buried Treasures and CNN's Lou Dobbs.

There is a rumor floating around the satellite radio boards that the SiriusXM app is out soon (there's that word again! ). Could be as early as Tuesday, but according to what I've read full price ($12.95) is being charged for the limited Internet radio subscription, which isn't worth it considering you don't get all the channels. If they had a way to just get the talk channels online I'd go for that since the music channels are worthless to me.