The United States Department of Justice has just announced that it doesn’t view the merger between XM and Sirius as anti-competitive:
After a careful and thorough review of the proposed transaction, the [Department of Justice's Antitrust] Division concluded that the evidence does not demonstrate that the proposed merger of XM and Sirius is likely to substantially [...]

XM Radio has suspended shock jocks Opie & Anthony for 30 days for their sex-and-violence laced jokes about Elizabeth II and Condoleeza Rice a week ago, according to CBS.
It is quite possible that the two jocks won’t return at all. NY1 reports that CBS radio canned two other shock jocks on terrestrial radio for making [...]

Leslie Shapiro at SciFi.com laments satellite radio’s limited market penetration:
Although it’s clear that I love satellite radio, it’s equally clear that most everybody else doesn’t. I recently bought a new car, supposedly “with XM.” The salesman had no clue if there was actually an XM receiver built into the car, and neither did his manager. [...]

Motley Fool contributor Rich Duprey thinks satellite radio will fail because of three glaring product shortcomings:
1) Repetitive playlists. The downside with channels that cater to your musical preferences is that your likely to hear the same songs over and over again. I’m not sure how to avoid this problem. I often listen to online radio [...]

Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. released its fourth-quarter report this morning and it shows some improvement. Sales more than doubled compared to the fourth quarter in 2005. Last year Sirius notched sales for $193.4 million compared to $80 the year before. Last year’s fourth quarter loss was $245 million compared to $311 million in 2005.
Sirius ended [...]

XM Satellite Radio announced its fourth-quarter erning this morning (Sirius will do the same tomorrow). For all of 2006, XM lost $732 million compared to $675 million. Q4 losses, however, were lower in 2006 than in 2005.
[Update: Barron's has a blog post with more numbers, analysis, and comments from XM's conference call. You can listen [...]

Here are links to some of the past weekend’s stories on the XM - Sirius satellite radio merger. For the record, I’m shifting from mildly positive towards the merger to decidely sceptical. I don’t see why two failed management teams should be allowed to take the path of least resistance and blatantly monopolize a market. [...]

Time for another round-up of commentary and thoughts on the proposed XM-Sirius merger.
There’s much excitement over at OrbitCast over SEC filings by CBS and other owners of terrestrial radio stations that claim that they do in fact compete directly against XM and Sirius, thus supposedly stripping them of the ability to claim that an XM-Sirius [...]

The Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania’s business school and widely regarded as one of the very best in the country) has an online magazine called Knowledge@Wharton. Yesterday the magazine interviewed Gerald Faulhaber - Professor of Business and Public Policy, Management, and Law, and formerly Chief Economist at the Federal Communications Commission - about the proposed [...]

Are XM Satellite Radio and Sirius Satellite Radio merging, as they claim, or is Sirius acquiring XM, as many newsreports claim? Reuters “mergers and acquisitions reporter” Michael Flaherty tries to explain what’s causing the confusion. It’s complicated enough to have made different analysts reach different conclusions and Sirius and XM have contributed to the confusion [...]