Europeans robbed of streaming XM radio

AROUND the globe, users of the free "AOL Radio" on-line music streaming service will find themselves without the popular American XM satellite radio channels, after the agreement between the two firms lapses today.

Since AOL opened up its "walled garden" on-line service and web sites and decided to offer free services and AOL accounts to anyone with a third party broadband provider a couple years ago, AOL Radio has been one of the highlighted features promoted by the firm to lure users into its freebie services.

The reason for this free-for-all change of heart was, of course, to have more eyeballs for its on-line adverts, by now its main source of revenue -or lack thereof. Thus, the addition of XM satellite radio channels to the AOL Radio line-up was for some a good enough reason to keep their AOL accounts active despite the subtle sense of shame often associated with using the services of the three-letter company - youknow, the ever present danger of being branded by geeky peers a "clueless newbie" or, in other words, an AOLer.

But for Europeans, "AOL Radio" provided something else: the only chance to tune into some of XM radio's 80+ advertising-free music channels. Predictably, after the firm announced the axing of the XM channels, some complaints started to pop up on the "AOL Radio" blog, specially from users outside of the U.S. One such user for instance said: "Being an international listener of AOL radio and having no other way of accessing XM radio (since XM is not available in other countries), I was glad when XM was added to AOL radio's line-up, but now I'm saddened."

User "Jacques" from France also lamented the firm's decision on its sister company's site, Winamp.com: "As an European listener of XM Radio via AOL ... it's a disaster for me, since I love XM Radios 6 and 7."

It should be noted that AOL Radio is not going away, but XM channels on it are. You can continue tuning to AOL Radio to listen to the firm's own music channels, over here. To quell criticism and entice users to subscribe, XM is offering a "special deal for AOL Radio listeners" on its XM on-line service, which, it should be noted, requires Windows Media and runs only on Windows and Mac OS-X. The special deal cuts the monthly subscription cost in half to $2.99 per month and our American readers can find it here.

Nevertheless, it's highly ironic that seven+ years ago AOL had one great Radio service provided by its sister company, Netscape. It was predictably dubbed "Netscape Radio", hosted on the namesake web site, and used pure HTML and embedded RealAudio for its audio streaming, making it instantly compatible with any OS with an available RealPlayer, including Linux. But all good things come to an end, and so Netscape Radio was eventually devoured by the AOL juggernaut.

Going back to the XM channels demise, the presumably American 'radiovegan' concluded: "AOL and XM don't owe anybody a lifetime of free programming. Be glad you got to hear so many great commercial-free channels from XM without paying for them for so long. If you will miss it that much, subscribe to XM instead of complaining."

The only problem with that argument is that there's no XM reception outside North America. And while XM's "online-only subscription dubbed "XMRO" would in theory provide the same level of service as AOL Radio with XM did, its user agreement is full of references limiting service to "U.S. Residents" and requiring a "U.S. mailing address", we suspect for music licensing reasons.

Of course, we would love to hear from our readers if the TOS are "just legalese" and if any of our readers succeeded in subscribing to XMRO by just providing a P.O. Box in America and using an international, non-U.S. credit card.

Finally, for a good discussion on satellite radio in Blighty and continental Europe and speculation about what Worldspace might or might not bring to Europe next year, see an interesting thread here. µ