SIRIUS Backstage

Broadband Instruments recently unveiled Slacker, a “Personal Radio” service to deliver content online and through a WiFi and Satellite-capable portable player. After recruting executives from MusicMatch, Rio, and iRiver; Slacker was ready to expand Personal Radio services, introduced by internet-only Last.fm and Pandora, to the portable market. Their satellite bandwidth will be leased from the Ku band, and is rumored to deliver 10,000 tracks/day (7 tracks/minute) to be archived on the portable receiver while docked. Slacker’s Portable Player will cost between $150-$350, dependent upon storage capacity desired. It will support MP3, subscription-based WMA, WMA, and MPEG-4/AAC-encoded audio files, and play WMV video on a 4-inch screen. You can try out the Slacker Jukebox online at Slacker.com. The online service is free, but for $7.50/month you’ll get a player without video ads and the ability to skip more than 6 songs per hour per channel.

How will the introduction of Slacker affect the Sirius/XM merger? Post in the comments section below.

[Via Wired, Orbitcast, Engadget, and CNet]

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 14th, 2007 at 12:11 pm and is filed under Merger, Satellite Industry, Internet Radio, Sirius. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.