here's my info about the 2 companies:
XMSR and SIRI have been something I have looked at for years now. The beauty of them is the fact that they are a duopoly. SIRI was once CDRD who orginally came up with the Satelite Radio Idea. The FCC needed years to find the bandwidth for them but once they did they demanded that CDRD have a competitior. Therefore XMSR was formed. To get into this field takes alot of money and the bandwidth to broadcast your signal, which the FCC has to give you. Billions is what is needed to get there, so to compete with them your going to need to make some huge debt like both companies have.
Funding for both companies is backed by their auto partners. GM, Honda, GMH, BMW, Damlier Chrysler, Ford and Clear Channel have their hands in this so funding will most likely come from them. Unless there is doom on the horizon for either company I don't expect them to dissapear and be swallowed up by their Auto Partners.
SIRI has had excecution problems. This was almost entirely due to LU/AGERE and the chipset design. All of SIRI being pushed back was because the chipset has NEVER been delivered close to on time. I think that the biggest mistake that the former CEO David Margolese did was to pick LU to do the chips. After Agere delivers the condensed chipset, we should expect SIRI radios in Ford and DC models since they have a marketing agrement with SIRI. Once that comes about I expect SIRI and it's new management to puch the "higher end" satilite radio.
The technology of the two companies is similar but different in delivery. XMSR uses 2 satelites that are stationed above the earth in a fixed position above the equador. On top of that they use alomst 1000 repeaters to make the signal stronger. SIRI has three satelites that constantly move in a orbit where at all time two of them have a clear view of North America. They also use under 100 repeaters. SIRI system should give a clearer less interfeared signal than XM.
SIRI also has all of it's music channels completely commercial free. XM has about 50% commercial free while the others have under 4 mins of commercials an hour, when terestrial radio has from 1/3 to 1/2 a hour of commercials.
Unless you have lived in a cave XM is on TV and print in ads everywhere. They obviously have a jump on SIRI, but SIRI is advertsising now with a NASCAR team and two NASCAR events later on this year. One being the Sirius Satelite Radio at the Glen at Watkins Glen International and the other being the Sirius Satelite Radio 400 at Michigan International Speedway. Both of these events take place in August. By then SIRI will have national rollout in the begining of July.
To look at this area in the simplest way possible you need to think in the next 10 years these two will split this market 50/50, so at that point with SIRI trading at about half of XMSR, SIRI seems to be the better buy today.
A Morgan Stanley Research Report (they do not have any invesment banking relationships with them anymore) has EPS estimates for 2007 of over $6 a share in earnings. With a normal P/E we should see $100 stock prices for both stocks. The only major problem that I can see with them is stock dilution from going to the capital market for cash to run their bussiness.
We will see this technology in our cars right from the dealer. I would expect by 2007 every car will come with Satelite Radio as an option or standard equipment. A decade from now most used cars will have this technology as prevalent as a CD player.
Needless to say I like it. Once you hear this you will never want to go back to regular radio. I think it's hear to stay. On op of that I agree that it's a AOL type stock, hopefully better than Iomega, but if we can get a run up like that then I'll be happy to put in some high stop losses.