Sirius/XM merger approved

I've been a Sirius satellite radio subscriber for about 2 1/2 years now and love the service. I chose Sirius over XM because of Howard Stern and have discovered that Sirius is so much more than Stern. Don't get me wrong, I listen to Stern every morning and in the afternoons during the playback of his show, but their music channels are commercial free and there's a channel for every taste. Very cool.

So it was about a year and-a-half ago that merge discussions between Sirius and XM. Check this out about the merger on orbitcast.com, which covers all news pertaining to satellite radio.

This merger has taken an unusually long time to go through and speculation was that the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), which covers terrestrial AM/FM radio, was opposed to the merger because of perceived competition a merger would create. Not surprisingly, Stern has been moaning and groaning about this for months saying the NAB is paying off people to stop the merger. Well, if that's true, then the effort failed because the Department of Justice approved the merger.

I was really hoping this merger was going to go through because it now means I'll be able to listen to baseball on satellite radio and not have to listen to it on crappy AM broadcast radio. Sirius carries all the other major sports (NFL, NHL, NBA and NASCAR) and XM had baseball. Woo-hoo!