First impressions: Now with combined channels, what do you think?
Posted by Ginny on November 13, 2008
… Orbitcast wants to know…
My initial thoughts? Well, not many at this point. I think the only issues I have are that there wasn’t much awareness given to customers regarding this. If I wasn’t subscribed to Sattelite radio discussion lists, or if I’d not been reading blogs dealing with Sattelite radio, then I’d not have known about the upcoming changes. And I’m not sure that this is good customer service.
Secondly, no old school hip hop channel? I don’t get this at all. They have Shade 45 and Hip Hop nation, seemingly identical channels, except perhaps Shade is uncensored, and Hip Hop Nation is not.
And The Heat, haven’t quite figured that channel out yet. Seems like they took what was The Heat yesterday and what was The City and merged it, and then took Raw and The City and merged that into Hip Hop Nation.
And only one Latin music channel? Do any of the bigwigs at Sirius XM know how many types of Latin Music there are? But I guess you coudl make that argument with African music or “world Music”, two channels I really wish they’d put back on the receivers and stop making them “online only”.
Anyway, if you look at the comments on Orbitcast, there are a lot of unhappy people out there. Many are threatening to cancel their services, if they’ve not already done so. I am not sure if I’m at that point or not. I’ll have to listen for the next few days/weeks and see what happens.
The thing is, though, with the exception of Chicago radio stations, which I listen to online, I hardly ever listen to terrestrial radio, unless I’m in the car, and I’m hoping to get a car kit for my XM receiver to chang that…
But we all knew this would happen, we all know once the merger was approved that the channels would be merged, and some would be happy, while others not. And channels are changing every few months or so, so I’m just going to wait and see what happens.
Pam said
Assalaam alaykum.
I have to agree with making these changes to the lineup without any warning. It’s a bit irritating, especially since it happened quite a bit in the past 3-4 months time.
I have Sirius and for the most part not much has changed in terms of the stations my husband and I listen to. The upside is that now, once I change my subscription plan, will be able to listen to hockey games, something I couldn’t do before
. And it seems like the XM Public Radio, which is part of the Best of XM plan on my side, is much better than the Sirius NPR.
I think time will tell about this merger, and maybe some of those unhappy people at Orbitcast should exercise some patience. I wonder if they bothered to take the listening survey that went out (at least on the Sirius side). Of course change is uncomfortable, but it also grows on a person & perhaps they will like something new