On February 14th, 2002, Sirius Satellite Radio launched service with a kick-off party at Cowboy Maloney’s Electric City in Jackson, MS. Also on that date, Sirius Backstage launched, starting as a fan page on technobistro.com. Over the next five years, while Sirius became the premier satellite radio provider, Sirius Backstage became the number one fansite for all things Sirius.

All this week Sirius Backstage looks back on five years of Sirius Satellite Radio. We have plenty of old advertisements, pics of prototype radios, channel lineups, and so on to talk about. From the loss of I-90 to the gain of Howard and everything in between. Today, we start with how Sirius came to be, the launch, and up to the end of 2002:

1990: Satellite CD Radio is formed, in order to buy spectrum the FCC is auctioning off for a “Digital Audio Radio Service”. They are competing with three other companies, including American Mobile Radio Corporation, now known as XM Radio.

1992: The company’s name changes to CD Radio

1994: CD Radio goes public with the ticker symbol CDRD, raising $7.5 million. They promise that when they start service, it will include 30 music stations and charge less than $10 per month

1997: CD Radio wins the auction, along with American Mobile, to acquire spectrum, and pays over $80 million for it.

June 1999: CD Radio signs agreement with Ford to be the exclusive satellite radio company for Ford vehicles.

November 18, 1999: CD Radio is renamed Sirius Satellite Radio. Ticker symbol changes to SIRI in January 2000.

2000: Sirius launches their three satellites June 30th, September 5th, and November 30th, 2000.

February 2000: Sirius and XM announce that they will work to form a satellite radio receiver that receives both signals.

Mid-2001: ClubXM launches, and quickly becomes the largest fan site and forum(at that time) for satellite radio.

2001: Sirius chipsets made by Lucent were not working properly, and delayed the company well past the original start date of early 2001. Shareholders sued, claiming that Sirius made false claims and knowingly lied when they stated service would start in 2001.

May 2001: Sirius announces it plans to charge $12.95 for the service, $3/month more than they stated before.

February 14, 2002: They launch their service at Cowboy Maloney’s in Jackson, MS. One young man named Jeff who went to Tulane University was there and took some pictures(and more here). He wanted to show the world, and Sirius Backstage was born.

Service was slowly rolled out over the spring of 2002, with the full nationwide launch on July 1st, 2002. The first radios included the Jensen SSR2000(left), which involved mounting a tuner box behind the Dash or under your seat. This baby loved to give off heat, and it could almost double as a skillet. Other radios available at the time of launch included the Audiovox Universal FM System. The Audiovox is also the only aftermarket add-on radio that had the same design for both XM and Sirius

June 20, 2002: A Sirius commercial airs on MTV, this is vastly different from most of their other ad campaigns so far.

August 15, 2002: XMFan is created as a joint venture by Ryan Morris and ‘Ziggy’.

September 20, 2002: As Club XM owners and moderators start losing their motivation, Jeff launches the Sirius Backstage forums in order to provide a new home for Sirius fans.

The image above is what people got to see for about 5 seconds every time they loaded a forum page; thankfully we haven’t had that for about 3 years now.

October 2002: Sirius announces a reorganization of the company’s debt, exchanging $1.5 billion of company debt, preferred stock, and cash for common stock, and causing the number of outstanding shares to increase tenfold, from less than 100 million to one billion.

October 7, 2002: Sirius announces Crispin as their ad agency. The agency would later produce the ‘it’s_ON’ ads for Sirius.

Fall 2002: Popular Science has a blurb about a new boombox(right). It has a Sirius tuner built-in, was supposed to be released by Kenwood(although the boombox itself was branded Jensen), and cost $500.

November 2002: New FM-modulated tuners are released, including ones by Kenwood, Panasonic, and Clarion.

November 4, 2002: I-60, the station for 60s Hits comes online. I-90 is taken off to make room.

November 15, 2002: Hertz to start installing Sirius in its vehicles.

December 31, 2002: Sirius ends the year with 29,947 subscribers

Tomorrow we will cover 2003: From ad campaigns and huge lineup changes to consultants and cool radio prototypes, 2003 had it all.

SIRIUS Backstage is looking for some new recruits, so we’re issuing an open call for new writers. If you live and breathe SIRIUS, this is your chance to be heard. Professional writing experience isn’t critical (though it doesn’t hurt); all we really care about is that you can stay on top of the news and write about SIRIUS.

Here’s what you need to send to apply:

• Two sample posts written for SIRIUS Backstage. These sample posts can be about whatever you want, but they should seem like they could have been on the front page of the site.
• A few words about yourself.
• A list of the SIRIUS radio(s) you have or have had in the past.
• A few things about SIRIUS that interests you.
• Your internet contact info (email, IM, etc. - no home address or phone number needed).
• How much time per week you can commit to blogging. Be realistic, okay?
• Oh, and no attachments or resumes.

We will only review fully completed applications. To apply, please use the Contact Us form for the site and select “Blog Editor Sign-up”.

We’re not sure how many of these we’ll get, so give us a little time to look them over.

Our open call for bloggers is now closed.

The staff here at SiriusBackstage are always trying to bring our members value not only in support and discussion of various Sirius offerings and equipment, but also tools to help you feel like you belong to our community. In that theme we present new tools to help you get the most out of SiriusBackstage.

First, we give you something that was suggested by one of your fellow members: the ability to turn off the scrolling It’s_On display next to the menubar at the top of the forum. You can now turn off the list of channels recently updated from the It’s_ON feature of the site in the User CP > Edit Options page. At the bottom, below the Forum Skin, is an option to Hide the It’s_ON feature from the forum pages.

Next, we have added a new look to SiriusBackstage for those of you using mobile devices. This look will strip our site down the bare minimum so that you can concentrate on getting the most out of the site instead of worrying about your wireless data bill. We can autodetect if you are using a mobile device and serve this new look to you automatically. If you happen to like viewing SiriusBackstage in all it’s graphic glory (called “SIRIUS Backstage”), on your device you should choose this style at the bottom of the User CP > Edit Options page. The setting is called Forum Skin. If you wish to have the forum auto-select the Mobile style when browsing to our site, please choose Forum Default for that setting.

And finally, you may have noticed that we have added the ability for you to Digg stories on our blog. Today, we expand, and extend that feature to our forums. You can now Digg any thread on the forum, as well as keeping up on those ever important Digg counts. In addition, you can also submit our threads to other social networking type sites such as Reddit, Fark and Slashdot to name a few.

We hope that you enjoy these new features and we thank you for being a part of the #1 online community dedicated to Sirius Satellite Radio.

Sirius Backstage is proud to announce two new members to our Top Dog program. The Top Dogs are personally selected by the moderators as a group of members who contribute an exceptional amount to our community, and generally have a wealth of knowledge about Sirius. Our two new members are:

-Soxnationonline, for organizing and hosting our Walk The Dog this past summer and fall. He stayed with it, and apparently something else is planned for January 8th.

-me_rubin, for his expertise with S50 and Stiletto radio support, including making the ‘3 Finger Salute: A Beginner’s Guide to Resetting the S50’

Congratulations, and thank you both for all your hard work.

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Sirius Backstage strives to provide the best support and answers to our 25,000+ members. Tonight, to ring in the New Year, we are adding the Sirius Backstage Knowledge Base. Also known as a wiki, the Knowledge Base allows us to better organize information and for our members to contribute even more to the site. Any registered member can edit the Knowledge Base pages, and anybody can view it.

Our KB lets everyone contribute to pages and correct out-of-date, or incorrect, information. If members put bad information in, there are tracking capabilities so we can lock out users who abuse the wiki.

We started the KB already by putting up some categories and creating the channel and hardware pages. The rest is now up to you! The Knowledge Base will not survive without your support, and we hope that all of our members use it to its fullest! The more information we put in, the more valuable it is to all of us, so jump in!

To get to the knowledge base directly, you can either go to http://www.siriusbackstage.com/kb, or click on the ‘Help’ button at the top. And yes, we will be changing the help button to a more appropriate ‘KB’ button in due time .

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Welcome to Sirius Backstage, the largest fan site for Sirius Satellite Radio! If you are new to Sirius and have questions about how to install it in your car/home, how to subscribe, technical support, or just about anything else, you’ve come to the right place! If you have questions about installation, please visit our Install Garage at http://www.siriusbackstage.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=13, or if you have everything plugged in just right, and something still won’t work correctly, come down to the Help Desk: http://www.siriusbackstage.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=3. For just about anything else Sirius, you are sure to find an answer somewhere in our forum: http://www.siriusbackstage.com/forum!

In order to post a question on our forums, you have to register, which you can do here: http://www.siriusbackstage.com/forum/profile.php?mode=register! It is free, only takes a couple minutes, and we will NEVER sell your email or spam you. Thanks again for visiting us, and welcome to Sirius!

Yesterday, Stiletto’s started arriving around the country at Circuit City locations (NOTE: Crutchfield has shipped them out, TSS Radio expects to begin shipments next week, and no word on when Best Buy will receive them). Backstage members are the first to review the Stiletto and provide pictures. Reviews for the most part have been good, with the occasional gripe that the wifi doesn’t work well or live on the go reception isn’t good. However, surprisingly, lots of people are reporting that live on the go reception works well.

Backstage members will remember all of the S50 problems, and early reviews seem to indicate that the Stiletto is virtually bug free. As more people receive them we will see if this holds true.

Keep watching our Stiletto forum for more reviews and pictures.

SIRIUSBackstage.com is happy to announce the return of Walk The Dog.

The concept behind Walk The Dog is to expand the SIRIUS listening experience beyond your favorite presets and discover all the great and diverse musical genres that SIRIUS has to offer.

The way that Walk The Dog works is every week we will be discovering three new SIRIUS music channels. There will be a channel that is consider popular, one that is considered somewhat popular, and one that is considered not so popular or that some have never tuned into before. Now of course opinions will vary from listener to listener, but the three channels each week will be very diverse so most everyone should have at least one channel that they will be discovering for the first time.

I encourage everyone participating to listen with an open mind. The goal of Walk The Dog is not to force you to listen to every music channel that SIRIUS offers but to encourage you to at least give every channel a try. There will be no rules as to how long or when during the week you have to listen the each channel all I ask is that you try to give each channel an hour of your weekly SIRIUS listening. During the week that the three channels are premiered there will be an open forum for us to discuss our thoughts and opinions of the channels.

New channels will be announced on Saturday with the listening experience starting on Monday and continuing through Saturday evening. Sundays will be dedicated to posting your final feelings of the channels and if you plan on listening to it in the future. There won’t be a set schedule to what channels will be played so if SIRIUS has any special programming or event on a channel we can schedule accordingly. It also gives us the ability to surprise everyone and we absolutely love surprises.

Full details can be found here.

We are proud to unveil a completely new SIRIUS Backstage website.

The SIRIUS Backstage community has experienced explosive growth since we founded it in 2002. To give our members the best online experience, we have upgraded to the leading online community solution available - vBulletin. vB powers many of the largest and most popular Internet communities.

In addition to the new features that come with vBulletin, we have introduced a new site design. The mission of SIRIUS Backstage is to offer a place for fans to interact with other SIRIUS listeners, and to get an Inside experience on what’s going on with the service, like a V.I.P. at a music concert.

To honor our ‘SIRIUS Insider’ member experience, we are incorporating a new music theme, while still keeping the easy to use, easy to read forum layout that everyone has grown to love. Not only does the site sport a new look, but there are also a whole host of new features that will make using the forums easier, more reliable and fun.

We would now like to extend thanks to our members who have made our site the most popular place to talk about SIRIUS Satellite Radio. Our Top Dogs deserve special recognition for their feedback and help in testing the new site, along with our moderator team and the designers at LMNtal Design. Our faithful Site Admin RyanM deserves a special thanks for making the transition smooth, and ensuring that our post history has been preserved. Kudos to Ryan for his tireless work to make this upgrade a success.

If you’d like to learn about all of vB’s new features, you can view the forum FAQ here.

Now grab a seat and ‘Let’s talk SIRIUS’.

Yesterday (May 5th) Sirius Backstage hit the 20,000 member mark. The 20,000th member was The Toilet. Thank you to all of our members for making Sirius Backstage the largest and greatest Sirius community out there. And on behalf of all of the moderators I’d like to thank TulaneJeff for founding and putting so many man hours behind Sirius Backstage.

For you history lovers out there here is some history about Backstage:

On February 14, 2002, SIRIUS Satellite Radio debuted a completely revolutionary new nationwide radio service. SIRIUS Backstage was originally sparked as a weblog to cover news and host photos of the SIRIUS service launch.

On September 20, 2002, SIRIUS Backstage launched their online forums, and soon afterward began an initiative to become the PREMIER online satellite radio community and fan site.