connecting*the*dots

I want a satellite radio product that meets *my* needs.

I want true convergence, not the usual business of multiple brands, releasing redundant products, creating sustainable profitability and not sustainable satisfaction.

It’s 2005 people; we deserve sustainable product offerings that meet our needs in any environmental scenario.

So what does the current portable, streaming, satellite landscape look like? Forgive the brand choices, but it seems to look something along the lines of…

Aside from the obvious competitive redundancies of the middle products, the feature overlap of any two products is pretty interesting to note:

• Portability (car, home, walking, etc.)
• Song ratings
• Random play
• Library of music to draw upon (satellite, jukebox, server, etc.)

When I see these overlapping product attributes, I also see opportunities for elegant simplicity, for product convergence, and most importantly, for happy consumers. I start to see…

Yahoo! Music plays audio files off a server, leveraging personalization settings, such as ratings of songs, artists, albums, genres, etc. What’s stopping them from striking up a deal with a Sirius or XM to create a completely personalized satellite/internet station?

A biz-dev deal here, a little bit of industrial and interface design changes there, a chunk of engineering and voila!; the physical satellite products could have input devices for rating these same music attributes. So the next time you’re on the beach, in your car, etc., you’re now continuously participating in updating your station to reflect your current passions and interests. Tie these setting into an Amazon or iTunes shopping experience and the collaborative filtering possibilities are endless.

Speaking of Apple, what about the iPod?

MP3 players bring the “tangible” nature of accessing a personal library of ripped and downloaded music. Bring this into the conversation and you now have a device that not only syncs personalization between devices via server/satellite communication, but also allows a consumer to archive a library of music/content for consumption in a more linear fashion (i.e. playing entire albums, setting up playlists, dj-ing, etc.).

Of course that also could be managed via satellite — providing the user a search and play capability — but that’s a bit more tricky regarding music rights and costs. It would also cannibalize owning CD’s and downloading music, although Napster and Rhapsody are already heading down the monthly cost for leasing music.

Once Sirius and XM start a partnership, splitting redundancies in content and sharing technology at a cost (like satellites), maybe, just maybe, we could see a sexy product, with beauty found on levels deeper than it’s original vision…

And yes, I too would rather have Apple lead the industrial design of this fantasy product than myself, but for visualization purposes (and because I’m long on Sirius, remember) I think my rendering will suffice for this conversation.

I smell a Dire Straits song in the works.