Liberty Media deal staves off Sirius bankruptcy

[Earth_First]

Source: Yahoo!

Liberty Media deal staves off Sirius bankruptcy
Liberty Media to invest $530 million in Sirius XM, fending off likely bankruptcy

NEW YORK (AP) -- Liberty Media Corp. will invest $530 million in Sirius XM Radio Inc., fending off a likely bankruptcy for the satellite radio company and blocking a bid by a rival, Dish Network Corp. CEO Charlie Ergen, to take control of Sirius.

As part of the deal announced Tuesday, Liberty will provide a $280 million senior secured loan to Sirius, $250 million of which will be funded on Tuesday. Sirius will use the proceeds of the loan to repay $171.6 million of its maturing 2.5 percent convertible notes that had been due. The rest will be used for general corporate purposes.

The loan from Liberty bears a 15 percent interest rate and matures in December 2012.

In exchange, Liberty will get 12.5 million shares of preferred stock convertible into 40 percent of Sirius' common shares, and two seats on the company's board. The company said it expects Liberty Chairman John Malone and President and Chief Executive Greg Maffei to join the board of Sirius.

Read more: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Liberty-Media-to-invest-in-apf-14376975.html

[bamademo]

1. I own Sirius stock. Maybe it will go up.

[serrano2008]

3. Yeppers. Up 68% so far today.

But really over the long haul, the coming months should look better than the past few months have been. This shows a lot of support for their business and that they still believe in them.

[pasto76]

2. I just want Howard to stay on the air

Way to go Mel for getting this deal done!!!

[dixiegrrrrl]

4. Happy sigh,,,,

We have Dish satellite, it carries about 70 Sirius channels, nice to have in an area where radio reception is almost zero.
Be even nicer if we could get the whole Sirius lineup option....

[w4rma]

5. The lack of competition would have caused the prices for all of your channels to go up, greatly.(nt)

[AndyA]

6. I have to say that Sirius' programming has been better as of late, IMO.

I hear songs on channels I haven't heard in ages, even on Sirius.

And The Strobe is back! Nothing like party music to get you going!!

[Tesha]

7. "Internet everywhere" spells the absolute death of broadcast radio

and probably broadcast TV as well.

When you can hear/watch whatever you want
whenever you want, why would you settle for
a broadcast program that someone else has chosen?

Wireless Internet = Sell your Sirius stock.

Tesha

[BumRushDaShow]

8. Until they upgrade the broadband pipes

broadcast will still be viable.... and even then, there's a Catch-22.

The problem with broadband media at this point is like the problem with the ad nauseum PC hardware/software upgrade cycling. An upgrade happens, the content providers (software) load up on the CPU-busting, bloatware features, machine slows down to a crawl where a 3.0 GHz machine acts like an 8 MHz '286, leading to the need for yet another hardware upgrade. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

With broadband, the more higher-quality content that gets streamed, the more the pipes fill up with multiple customers streaming, leading to nightmarish video and audio stuttering, drop-outs, etc... This then prompts those handling the infrastructure to try to throttle it all back, which in turn limits the number of streams, and negates the whole point of this being a "replacement".

The 'net has a ways to go before it can replace broadcast. But broadcast would do better if it offered more on-demand (and that includes radio on-demand if the tech could be implemented). Satellite radio has become the ad hoc "internet" of the broadcast world where there's much more diversity in the content.

[Tesha]

9. Wow! Your experience must differ from ours!

The other night, we watched a full episode of Star Trek and then a full
episode of CSI: Miami via downloads from http://www.cbs.com . I don't
recall if we were on the 3 Mbit/s FairPoint DSL or the who-knows-what-speed
Comcast cable broadband, but the network throughput was consistently high
enough that we saw almost no "pauses for buffering". There were also far
fewer commercials embedded in these shows than if we watched them "over
the air". Overall, the experience was entirely satisfying and we'll definitely
do it again.

Meanwhile, my iPhone has any number of ways of streaming audio down to
the phone over Edge or 3G telecom networks or local WiFi, so there goes
broadcast audio as well!

Now if someone would just put all the episodes of Holmes on Homes online,
we'd be very happy campers!

Tesha

[BumRushDaShow]

11. I live in a city of 1.5 million

which is quite a bit different from a city of ~90,000, which is basically the size of a couple neighborhoods here. So yes, the broadband can be quite congested - and this is with Comcast's lowest 6 Mb/sec rate plus its so-called "power boost" for a short-term burst. On weekends I stream SmoothJazz.com and the buffering/dropouts can be annoying sometimes - even using their 192 Kb/s octoshape client. This has been an issue for a number of broadband providers in cities, particularly if customers are unfortunate enough to be on an oversubscribed node and/or are on a node with alot of kids gaming or downloading or streaming or whatnot.

I also have Verizon DSL as a backup and at least to my spot, the highest that they could give me was 768 Kb/s. Since it's a backup, I'm okay with it but for any type of high quality video streaming, the minimum of which basically requires about 300 Kb/s, forget about it on that.

And I have Sprint's 3G on a HTC Touch and a Motorola i902, both with internet and TV/music access, and yes, that is congested and jerky as well, although I am still glad to have the access at all since I use them for that way more than for calls. LOL I subscribed (one time fee) to SelectRadio and can stream a bunch of radio stations on the Touch.

But, IMHO, broadband is not quite ready for primetime to replace anything broadcast until they create some bigger pipes. Perhaps when the new 700 Mhz spectrum comes online, that will spread the wealth out some more, but for the time being, be glad if you are in a sparsely populated area! :)

[Tesha]

12. Complain to Comcast, often.

We were one of our neighborhood's "early adopters":
really great bandwidth at first, then, eventually,
attrocious any time the kids came home from school.
We complained and made a lot of news about ejecting
Comcast in favor of DSL. Mysteriously, we no longer
see so much of the usual nightly and week-end slowdowns.

Tesha

[No Elephants]

10. Anyone know if Malone and Maffei are good guys or

bad guys?

Which, I guess, begs the question whether ANY good guys are media moguls these days.