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In December 2003, we announced a seven-year agreement with the National Football League to transmit NFL games live...In most cases, we plan to carry both the home and visiting team game broadcasts.
While this is a nice touch, does anyone else consider this to be overkill? Especially if they pre-empt talk programs to carry a 2nd call on the same game. Now I see no way they can have NFL, NBA and NHL on at the same time.
Manco, I think (pure speculation) this indicates that they have plans for a set number of NFL streams. If there are a lot of games on at once, they each get 1 feed. For times when the schedule is lighter, they fill those streams with the alternate feed. Of course if I'm right, we could have the MNF game in a half-dozen languages!
Bottom line, none of us (except probably SiriusRon, and yes I do consider him one of us) has any idea how they'll implement this, and they may have plans to deal with the issues you've raised here Manco.
Who knows, they may not have afternoon games on for the NHL/NBA.
Since it IS Sunday midday/afternoon, I wonder if they will combine traffic/weather channels?
The other possibility is that they will create additional channels for it. Right now they have:
-4 weather
-3 sports play by play
-Sirius Sports Action
-Radio Deportivo
-Sports Byline
-NFL Radio Network
-Raw Dog
-OutQ(repeats on weekends)
-Our Time
-CourtTV(but it will pre-empt all court cases that happen on Sunday!)
-WSM
-2: Right/Left
-CNBC or Bloomberg(there is no business on Sundays)
-C-Span
that is 20 channels, enough to run the bulk of the games at 1:15p on Sundays. Now, if Sirius were to create 3 extra channels to run the games, and pair up the traffic/weather channels for 5 free channels, it would look more like:
-4 weather
-6 play by play
-Sirius Sports Action
-Radio Deportivo
-Sports Byline
-NFL Radio Network
-CourtTV
-5 traffic/weather
Now I see no way they can have NFL, NBA and NHL on at the same time.
That would only be a problem on Sunday afternoons during the first 2 or 3 months of the NBA or NHL season, so there would not be many NBA or NHL games that would be affected.
Give a cookie to Ben for digging into our 10k! We were going to spring that one soon enough, but now that the cat is out of the bag, I can say that we are preparing now for the September launch of football, and we're excited that our subscribers will have a choice of broadcast for most every NFL game. In all, SIRIUS will have an amazing lineup of sports every Sunday in the fall.
Regarding conflicts with the NBA and NHL, most Sunday hockey and basketball games happen in the late afternoon after the first set of NFL games are completed, and when there are fewer NFL games to compete against. We don't expect an issue, though we may not be able to broadcast every last NHL or NBA contests.
On another NFL note, Sirius will be in full-force for the NFL draft, live next month from Madison Square Garden!
Thanks for the update Ron! May I ask a follow-up question? When you say, "Sirius will be in full-force for the NFL draft, live next month from Madison Square Garden!" does that mean we'll have the NFL Radio Network stream up and running at that point? Thanks for sharing any info you can!
Woo-hoo! Now that it has been confirmed, I know of two people who will be signing up, but the main reason they did not was because they would only get home broadcasts half the time.
Now I have Mike and Merrill when I'm off to West Bumblef**k, NY in September! Yippee!
Thanks Ben. SiriusRon, can you confirm that the Redskins Radio Network will have home and away games? It still burns me up that they replaced Frank Herzog with Larry Michaels, but I'd like to know if Sonny and Sam will be available all the time. I am currently a XM subscriber, but I only have satellite radio for the sports. Sirius is my next purchase, and it hinges solely on the NFL programming.
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Dual service subscriber since 8-25-06.
Just put in the company name. Only catch is that the info is posted the day AFTER it is released.
For Sirius, just get it direct from the source. Go to their site, then Company Info (little text at the bottom), and then on the left choose Investor Relations, and then SEC Filings. (I'm not 100% that is the absolutely correct path since the sirius homepage is crashing my IE this afternoon! argh!) They update that as it is filed. You can also sign up in there somewhere to get email alerts for all press releases and financial filings. It works very well.
Interesting note about the NFL in the 10-K:
Great discovery, Ben, I can't wait! 
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