Sirius Pounces XM wiith New Subscribers

October 4, 2006 By Ian Bell

Sirius Satellite continues to show strong growth by adding almost 200,000 more subscribers than XM in Q3 of this year.

XM Satellite Radio has added more than 285,000 new subscribers over the past 3 months for a total of 7.185 million subscribers. The company says they will be on track to end the year with total subscribers between 7.7 million and 8.2 million.

Also announced is that XM will no longer include certain rental car fleets in their subscription total (approx. 20,000 subscribers) despite their goal of increasing the number of rental cars that use their service.

Sirius on the other hand, has continued to show strong growth by adding a whopping 441,101 subscribers in the 3rd quarter of 2006, more than a 130% increase over Q3 of 2005. Their total numbers are still less than XM Satellite Radio though with a subscriber base of 5.1 million.

Sirius introduced their new Stiletto portable satellite radio and MP3 player just a couple weeks ago. The small player carries a hefty price tag at $349.99 not including a $69 home kit or subscriber fee. XM has partnered with a number of manufacturers such as Pioneer and Samsung to add XM Satellite functionality to their MP3 players. You can view a video of the Pioneer Inno in action here.

Showing 2 comments

Jared at 11:29pm 11th October 2006 ok let me start off by saying that i sell sat radio, and i feel that XM is a far stronger service. when it comes to subs you forgot to mention that Sirius counts cars that have sat in them once there sold to the dealer, in my opinion that shouldent count. XM on the other hand dose not count a sub untill there is a paying member. bases on this fact sirius's numbers are deffinatly over inflated. as to the other posters coment, i have never herd of xm lowering there rates unless you set up a multiyear sub.
Matt at 5:12pm 4th October 2006 I have a friend who owns an Acura TL, he has XM radio built in, but didnt want to subscribe to the XM service. He has another friend that was in the same position, but decided to call anyways. He said that XM dropped their rate to like 3.00 month for service in his car. I told my friend I didn't believe it, but he says it's true. Has anyone else out there tried that? I wonder if their that desperate to do it, or if they are just trying to build up their base of customers?