XM Bandwidth

[Roger]

How many more stations could XM add? The Boneyard plays too much sissy stuff and the other metal station plays too much hard crap.

[djlong]

XM has had claims that they expect to be able to ass more channels as compression encoding technizques improve. They're deliberately vague about how much that might be.

There *is* spectrum out there that can be sold as I understand it. The FCC allotted so much bandwidth for SDARS. Only half of it was ever auctioned according to what I've read on other sites. Again, according to what I've read, the spectrum was divided into 4 equal slices. The middle two slices were sold to the companies that became XM and Sirius. The theory was that either two more companies could enter the market later OR, if that was impractical, the two EXISTING companies could buy the spectrum adjacent to their existing spectrum to expand their content.

[FTA Michael]

1) I read an article in 2600 (uh, at a doctor's office, I think) that concluded that XM must really be straining its bandwidth to get its current set of channels to sound as good as they do.

2) A few months ago, when XM foolishly, sadly disposed of Special X, easily its best channel, plus a few others, it was to make way for an equivalent number of new music channels. This strongly suggests that they're currently maxed out; otherwise they'd keep the old channels and add the new ones.

[Steve Mehs]

There were five channels that were removed in Feb, Special X, C Net Radio, Vibra, Tejano and Aguila. I remember reading the three Spanish channels that were removed were programmed by Univision and there were disputes between XM and Uni, which could explain their removal, C Net Radio aka The David Lawrence channel was probably removed due to the channel being nothing like it used to be as to why Special X was removed, no clue. But since then XM has added a channel, America Left, so they do have some bandwidth to play with, but no body’s really sure how much and XM still has 5 traffic/weather channels to add, but those take up very little bandwidth from the way the sound.