Foreverpurple

Can this be true??? Rick just called me, says he’s listening to the Scott Ferrall show on Sirius and Scott said the merger has been APPROVED!?!?!? I can hardly believe it’s true. I didn’t find anything confirming it on Google News.

How’s that for blog power?? 16 months pending…last week I install a merger counter and here we are with approval finally!!! I’m starting to scare myself!!

The closest I can find is that they are at a 2-2 vote tie waiting for Tate to vote so it can go either way. I don’t follow news on tv so I will have to wait for confirmation in the morning.

The tentative deal is more palatable than the proposed deal:

Under the tentative deal, the companies would pay a $20 million fine for violating FCC rules. They allegedly have operated several hundred repeater antennas at illegal locations and failed to follow through on vows to develop radios that can work with either satellite service.

Also, the FCC would be able to review a three-year freeze on subscription prices several months before it expires to decide if it should be extended.


Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, a Democrat**, voted to block the merger Wednesday after he failed to muster support for several stronger concessions he proposed last week.

He wanted the services to freeze prices for six years, include a tuner that would let satellite receivers receive new digital broadcasts from traditional radio and set aside 25% of their channels for public-interest programming, up from the companies’ 8% commitment.


Besides the price freeze and public-interest set-aside, the companies have agreed to offer a la carte programming for both services within three months after the $3.9 billion merger is approved.

And they’ve said they’ll make interoperable radios within a year and create an open standard so any company could make satellite radio receivers.

**Jackass extraordinaire and NAB flunky obviously…