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Today Mel Karmazin submitted an editorial piece to the Washington Times.

Mel starts off by saying, “In my four decades in the radio business, I’ve closely watched — and often played an active role in — the evolution of audio entertainment. But nothing I’ve touched though has come close to changing the consumer experience in the way I expect the recent announcement from Sirius and XM to offer a la carte programming following our merger will.”

Mel goes on to talk about the a la carte packages and hardware compatibility. He also mentions the resistance from the NAB and asks the question, “Have you ever heard of a product or service that hurt competition by lowering prices and increasing choice?”

He elaborates on the competition within the audio entertainment market.

“In the vast U.S. radio market, even our combined company will still be a relative small fry, accounting for only 3.4 percent of radio listeners. However, the efficiencies and cost savings we realize from the merger will allow us to compete more aggressively with terrestrial radio, the 800-pound gorilla that still dominates the industry. Terrestrial radio reaches 230 million weekly listeners who access terrestrial programming free of charge in virtually every home and vehicle in America.”

As for the regulatory hurdle facing the proposed merger Karmazin states, “As for passing the regulatory hurdle of demonstrating that the merger is in the public interest, this transaction is a slam-dunk: Consumers will have lower prices and more choice — the very definition of serving the public interest. What’s more, the fact that our competitors offer their content for free over public airwaves is all the incentive we need to keep our quality high and our prices as low as possible.”

I must say if the merger is blocked, it will not be due to a lack of effort on the part of Mel. Enjoy the read.

Washington Times

Monday, August 6th, 2007 at 4:11 pm and is filed under Merger, Satellite Radio. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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