Re: XM SATELLITE RADIO STARTS TOMORROW ON DIRECTV!!


At 6am Eastern, all of the Music Choice channels vanished from the guide,
then the XM channels began appearing in blocks for the next 5 or so minutes.
Initially, all the song tags had the names of other channels (i.e. 50s on 5
came up as the title, artist, and CD on another channel). Then the correct
song titles began filling in, but some channels are still showing song titles
from other channels. To start the rumor mill a bit, one of the channels (I
believe Home Plate) had XM Comedy tag info for a second, so DirecTV more than
likely has the ability to receive this channel, should they decide to add it
in the future.

The audio quality is definitely better than what we get on the sats.
We're definitely getting close-to-live from XM, as the
DirecTV feed is a full 10 seconds ahead of the XM, and if you add the DirecTV
normal 3 second delay, you have the 13 seconds from XM studio to uplink to
downlink that you usually experience. Song title updates seem to be faster
than Music Choice was (typically you'd be looking at the title for the
previous song for about 15 seconds before the screen blanked and showed the
new title, as opposed to pretty much instantaneous now) but still rather
glitchy, becuase DirecTV doesn't seem to be receiving the titles for all
songs, even though they are showing on the XM display with no problems. Some
channels same to not be getting title updates at all.

TiVO recording requires some creative navigation, as recording/pausing
capability is off for these channels, but you can use Wish Lists to
auto-record, but then have to edit your TO DO list so you're not just
recording a channel all day. :-P

I listened to Opie & Anthony all day on launch day, and they've never
sounded better!  Anybody else check any of this out?

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