Satellite Radio Playground

By Brian “Newman” Rayl

A few days ago, my partner Dennis “Cos” Costa and I wrote an article speculating on the possibilities of a Slacker/Pandora type application for Sirius XM (NASDAQ:SIRI) and how it would benefit the company to create such a service or buy out one of the existing services. One of the key issues that we determined was in this paragraph:

“We also both agreed that Slacker and Pandora are feature rich with a very nice “jukebox” feel to it, allowing you to customize your very own personal radio stations, while providing users with some music discovery advantages at the same time. You can base your station on a certain group or a certain theme, as well as creating a ”hate songs” list so that they never play again. The personalization of these services is quite nice. Obviously you cannot do the this with Sirius XM, leaving the user only able to pick a genre of music, but not the artist.”

– Should Sirius XM (SIRI) Buy Slacker or Pandora?

Yesterday TWX, a member of our forums, brought to our attention a patent that was filed back on June 19th, 2008 and owned by XM Satellite Radio. According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), the basis of this patent is as follows:

“The present invention relates to a system and method for providing a broadcast radio service listener with the ability to generate a personalized radio channel play-list on a radio receiver from broadcast content as it is received. More specifically, the present invention relates to a system and method for buffering content from a set of channels selected from among the broadcast channels of a source stream(s) as they are received, and for generating a playback stream using the buffered content that provides a multichannel listening experience to the user with preview, reverse, fast forward and other navigation functions for the buffered content.”

– United States Patent Application #20090320075

In fact, Slacker, Pandora, and Last.fm are specifically referenced within the filing as examples of what the purpose of the patent is geared towards. The filing states that “on-line personalized radio services [have] demonstrated its appeal to music fans as evidenced by the continued growth of personalized radio service providers such as Pandora, LastFM and Slacker. These providers assemble personalized play-lists for users by accessing a large music library where each song has a meta-data field containing ratings on multiple stylistic parameters.” The patent filing goes on to say that “a need exists for a live satellite radio offering with low cost hardware that does not require a large local song database to be built over time at a satellite receiver by recording content matches received over-the-air or via other broadcast method.” Read More