M:Metrics: Sprint Streams Sirius

Mark Donovan at M:Metrics blogs about Sprint announcing that its Vision subscribers with multimedia phones would be able to subscribe to 20 commercial free channels of Sirius satellite radio music for $6.95 per month.

Donovan writes why streaming music to handsets makes better sense from both a usage and business model perspective compared to the much ballyhooed OTA download model. He voices skepticism that the latter will see "any kind of mainstream success in the immediate future," and believes the "Achille's heel is no longer technology, though getting enough EVDO handsets into people's hands will take time. No the weak link is the business model."

Donovan outlines the pricing and royalty issues holding back mobile music downloads and states:

royalties on streaming music services are calculated in an entirely different way and provide much more pricing flexibility for aggregators and carriers. In terms of consumer experience, streaming music sounds great on the right handset and doesn't require an EVDO-sized pipe which, in the Sprint case, means that they can continue to leverage their 1XRTT network and immediately address a much larger audience