General SIRIUS Information

Sirius Satellite Radio NASDAQ: SIRI is a satellite radio (DARS) service based in New York City that provides 68 streams (channels) of music and 55 streams of sports, news and entertainment to the United States and Canada. Music streams on Sirius carry a wide variety of music genres, broadcasting 24 hours a day, commercial free. With any Sirius-enabled radio, the user can see the artist and song information on display while listening to the stream. The streams are broadcast from three satellites in an elliptical geosynchronous orbit above North America. A subset of Sirius’ music channels are included as part of the DISH Network satellite television service. Sirius channels are identified by Arbitron with the label “XS” (e.g. “XS120”, “XS9”, “XS17”).

Sirius headquarters are in Manhattan. Its business model is to provide pay-for-service radio, analogous to the business model for premium cable television, in which music channels are free of commercials. Subscription costs for Sirius range from $12.95/mo. to $499.99 for a lifetime subscription (of the receiver, not the subscriber). A $10 activation fee ($15 if activated by phone) is also required. Sirius currently has fewer subscribers compared to competitor XM Satellite Radio, with 4 million, less than XM's current audience of roughly 6.5 million (as of April 13, 2006). However, Sirius is gaining new subscribers at a faster rate than XM.

Sirius was previously known as CD Radio. The company changed its name to Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. on November 18, 1999. The dog in the Sirius logo (Sirius is referred to as the "Dog Star") is unofficially named “Mongo,” a name garnered from the debut of Sirius Satellite Radio’s sponsorship on Casey Atwood’s and later Jimmy Spencer’s NASCAR entry, when the announcing cast voted on names. “Mongo” later became NASCAR driver Spencer’s nickname with the NASCAR Broadcasters in the following races.