Siriusxm

There are cheaper plans that offer fewer channels. My plan is about $98.91 per year which is my Christmas gift from my oldest daughter.

 

I never even activated mine. Nothing I wanted to listen to since Sirius merged with XM.

 

I'm not positive, but I think HD radio is the source for traffic info and weather. Satellite radio would have a hard time customizing a station for a driver's area.

 

You are correct.

 

Sat radio used to have local traffic and weather- in NYC it was Channel 133. They have discontinued it so I am discontinuing them. BTW, you can lower the cost by calling and telling them it's too high. Also, if you let it lapse you'll get a letter in a few months offering you a good deal.


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I've been paying $60/year for the following as stated in the offer I got: "140+ channels of SiriusXM, including commercial-free music, plus sports, news, talk and entertainment." I call each time it expires and negotiate a renewal at the same price. It's not worth more than $5/month to me since I rarely listen to more than just two SiriusXM stations. I have too many other listening options including Pandora and Amazon Music to which I subscribe.

 

It takes a serious (Sirius?) effort to get them to stop offering you "deals". Phone calls at all hours. Snail mail once a week.

I told them I'd do $120 all in for three years service including two cars, and if they couldn't offer that then to stop all forms of communication. I'm not willing to spend even as much as what Pandora charges for something that only works on one device with, generally, worse fidelity.

They said, "But Pandora doesn't have Howard Stern!" Clearly. I hung up.

 

I have T-Mobile and they don't charge for streaming, so there is no hit to my data plan. If you have little cell reception I would stick with XM.

Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.

 

I haven't down-converted my FLAC library to MP3 yet, to put on the USB port, so I've been using Pandora a lot recently. In my urban location, LTE and 3G is pretty solid; XM had a lot more dropouts from overpasses and parking garages during the trial period.

This holiday season I drove over 300 miles between Houston, Austin, and Kingsland, TX mostly on state highways and Sprint had me covered (edit: with data roaming enabled) except for a 20 minute span on a 2-lane county road in the rural hills. I don't really worry about data use as I'm grandfathered on an "unlimited" plan.

Since you asked, here's what my phone reports:

If it's too small to read, Entune (almost all of it Pandora) pulled under 600MB during the period of December 13 to January 4.

I have it set to pull the "high-quality" audio, but even then Pandora compresses it to a bitrate akin to a 128kbps MP3, I think. I hear fewer digital compression artifacts on Pandora than my ears detected on similar XM stations, but it's only marginally better. Light and airy vocals on Pandora seem to be the worst.

Also! I get my custom stations everywhere. XM has a Pandora-like feature but only on Internet devices not from the satellite, obviously. And then there's the interruptions! Lots of XM channels are "commercial free" but they still interrupt the music with DJ banter, channel announcements, and XM promos. Pandora (when paid) is song after song after song; bliss.

 

The reply to that is, "Who"?