I think enough hints have been dropped to guess how the merged service will work. First, you'll still have the traditional XM and Sirius subscribers who continue to listen on their old receivers. Not much will change for them. The prices and channels will be pretty much the same, except the channels that are obvious duplicates will be simulcast. In other words, an XM subscriber listening to the 80's channel will hear exactly the same broadcast as a Sirius subscriber listening to his/her 80's channel.

The big change will come with the new dual band receiver. It will not recognize the difference between XM and Sirius. All channels will potentially be available, but it sounds like they will be sold in packages. For instance, you could pick which music and talk channels you wanted to buy. One big advantage of the new tuner would be the ability to hook a lot more customers. Car makers would no longer have to choose one service over the other. Within a few years it's likely that every new car sold would come equipped with the new tuner. Basic subscriptions (with about 40-50 channels) could be sold for only a few dollars per month. Or you could sign up for all channels for something like $17.95/month.

If the combined company could get 40 million subscribers at an average of $10/month, that would be almost $5 billion per year in revenue!

And than the price of Sat Radio would just keep going up and up to the stratosphere since the only competion is HD radio and not many car manufactures are even including HD radios as options that I know of.

I just read a Consumers reports concerning cable and how price has doubled in last decade and they attributed it to "No Competition".

It also burns me that the vehicle that I just bought in the fall aready has a outdated Sat Radio.

_DonB2

I don't really buy into the "monopoly" idea. Everybody watches TV (pretty much), so yeah, if there's only one provider in an area, that's a problem (thank goodness for satellite tempering the cable providers somewhat). However, with satellite radio, if you don't subscribe, there's still FM/AM, CDs, iPods, etc. to listen to in the car or wherever. I love my XM radios (we have 5 subscriptions, one in each car, one in the house, and 2 "gifts" for family), and enjoy them pretty much everyday. But honestly, if the price became too much to justify, I'd drop it in an instant. XM/Sirius must realize this, and that if they raise prices too much they'll lose many customers. So I think there is somewhat of a buffer there to avoid too much gouging.

I'll still be a little surprised, however, if the FCC approves it.

I would like to buy a external HD tuner receiver that I could plug into the car so I could give HD radio a try when on the road.

Maybe it would work thru a FM xmitter or via cassette adapter.

The biggest challenged would be getting to the radio antenna buried in the dash.

Maybe such a HD radio is already out there.

-DonB2

This may be too specific a question to answer at this time, but all those AV receivers that have built-in XM compatibility... Will those plugs be obsolete when the dual tuners come out? Will the panasonic mini tuner dock station work with a dual tuner?

I'm looking at AV receivers right now. I would am a sirius subscriber now due to my favorite college sports team being broadcast on Sirius. They are about to move over to XM for broadcasting their sporting events, so I'll be moving with them.

Mel has hinted that existing receivers will handle the entire spectrum. Thus, XM receivers will be able to receive Sirius channels and vice versa. There is no need for a dual band receiver.

This implies that XM receivers can decode the Sirius format, which makes sense, since when both services were introduced they used the same (PAC) codec.