Satellite radio has certainly taken off. It is extremely popular for two or three main reasons such as quality, content and availability. In the perspective of satellite radio, quality refers to the quality of sound that is capable of being reproduced by the equipment because of the signal; content refers to the types of programmes being broadcast by the various radio channels or stations and availability refers to the footprint or coverage of the satellite, that is how much area of land receives the signal from the satellite.

All these comparisons are made with terrestrial radio broadcasts naturally. For example, we all know that standard AM or FM stations differ hugely in quality, the content can be heavily interspersed with advertising, jingles and mindless chatter and coverage is usually only on a very localized basis.

The two giants in the American satellite radio market are of course Sirius and XM and each one is trying to out do the other in these three areas

Normally, satellite radio produces a quality of sound which is equivalent to CD quality. This is extremely high, particularly if you use decent quality equipment to replay the signal received. If you merely replay satellite radio through tinny, ancient, blown speakers, then you will hardly benefit from this boost in quality at all.

Quality, content and coverage have all played a part in increasing the popularity of satellite radio, but it is probably content which has played the biggest part.

You may be wondering why anyone would want to shell out for subscription radio, when there is so much free radio about. It is a valid point, but in fact, similarities can be drawn with cable TV and broadcast television. Why do people pay for that? Is it the sound quality? Or the content? Or what? A lot of cable TV is rubbish too. Sports coverage, possibly.

At least the preponderance of satellite radio is free of commercials. That has to be worth a few dollars a month and it is in fact a large selling point. Many people cite the lack of commercials as one of their foremost reasons for moving to satellite radio.

It is likely that all big league sports games will move to subscription only over the next couple years. This will inevitably be carried out with the utilization of satellite radio. American football, soccer, baseball, basketball will all either get their own nationwide stations or be bundled with other stations

People are bored with with the amount of advertising on AM and FM radio, but at the end of the day, the main reason whether to get satellite radio or not for most people rests on content not even so much on the quality of the sound. If sport is taken off terrestrial radio and only available on satellite radio, then people, particularly men, will switch to satellite radio, which is exactly what happened with cable and satellite television.

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on a variety of topics, but is now concerned with Bose alarm clocks. If you would like to know more, please go to our web site at Bose Digital Radio.