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XM Radio is totally taking its ball and going home over TimeTrax

While not directly TiVo related, recently on a few threads here mentioning the radio features of networked appliances and Microsoft's Media Center, we've talked about how great it'd be to get a "tivo for radio."

Everyone has their favorite radio shows, but we've all got our own schedules that rarely allow us to catch them. Well, someone heeded our call and made a program called TimeTrax that schedules recordings off your PC-based XM satellite radio and saves them as MP3s you can listen to later.

So let's look at this for a second. XM radio is a subscription-based satellite radio network that runs $9.95 per month. There are several types of receivers but one of the cheapest is a USB-based unit that works on Macs and PCs, costing around $50. Simply put, folks that get XM radio are big fans of radio.

XM radio is fairly well scheduled, with daily talk programs, super hip DJs on music channels, and various bits of esoteric comedy and news programs. I myself tried it out for about 5 months earlier this year. I originally got it to hear some BBC and Air America, but quickly found myself spending more time enjoying the various jazz and alternative stations. In addition to talkshows, the music channels are superb, almost seeming like a college station where all the DJs are way into their kinds of music and the boring corporate stuff is nowhere to be heard. Eventually I gave it up when I couldn't always be around to catch various comedy and talk shows on time.

TimeTrax not only lets you schedule recordings, but you can have it search for keywords like bands you like and people you want to hear on shows. Basically, it gives big time radio fans a powerful tool to let them enjoy their radio even more. So what did XM radio do when they found out?

They decided to stop selling the USB-XM radio hardware altogether. They claim piracy, but if someone's paying $10 a month just to save a few MP3s, I seriously doubt they are redistributing it to thousands of folks that would otherwise be XM customers (unless someone can show me an XM radio archive somewhere of all these pirated MP3s). XM shouldn't be pulling devices off the market that get them new subscribers (duh, the units are inoperable without a subscription), they should have bought the TimeTrax product and incorporated it into their PC control software, which did allow you to set alarms when your shows were on (you still had to actually sit in front of the computer and listen to them though).

XM dropped the ball, picked it up, and is now taking it home instead of giving their most loyal customers a chance to further enjoy their subscriptions on their own time. But at least for me, there's now an upside. I can take my $40 XM radio PCR unit and sell it on eBay for upwards of $400.

by Matt Haughey September 1, 2004 in News

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