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Sirius Radio, or multi-phasic streams
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Sirius Radio, or multi-phasic streams
#1
It's been a while since I listed to satellite radio.  Over the past three months (yeah, I'm very near the end of my free trial lol), I've started noticing something odd and magical.  It's probably just probability smiling down on me combined with observer bias, but it seems like a lot of the time, when I change stations, the new station is at the very beginning of *something* (either a song, or an announcer's message just after a song).  Which got me thinking...

If this is real (and it's probably not), I was wondering how it'd be possible.  Well, the satellite knows who individuals are, since you have to connect using your device id to verify that you have access to the stream.  Which means there's a handshake that takes place, where the device (probably a car) says "hi, I'm xxxx, and I want to stream yyyyy", followed by "hello xxxx, you have the ok to stream yyyyy, connect to frequency zzzzz to begin streaming".

But what if the stream isn't "radio" at all, but pre-recorded streams?  If the dj marks certain points of the stream with waypoints, then there could be quite a few different streams for a single station.  So if the dj puts a waypoint at the beginning of the current track, then the service could start a new stream every 10 seconds or so that starts at that point.  Each station would have maybe 20ish different streams, each delayed a little more than the last, all delayed a few seconds from "live".  Any new connections get routed to whichever stream is nearest a waypoint and newest, giving almost everyone a "wow, look at you, this song JUST started!!!" feel, while still blasting a single stream to thousands of people instead of an individual stream to each connection.

I don't know if that makes any sense, and I'm pretty sure that's not what they do, but I think it's a cool idea.
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#2
would you rather tune into the middle of a song?
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#3
Well, that's how radio works. Whatever's currently on air, is what you hear. And 99% of a song is anything that isn't the beginning of the song, so probability states that you'll rarely change stations just as a song is beginning.
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#4
(Feb-06-2017, 05:01 AM)nilamo Wrote: Well, that's how radio works.  Whatever's currently on air, is what you hear.  And 99% of a song is anything that isn't the beginning of the song, so probability states that you'll rarely change stations just as a song is beginning.

Probability states that you change stations to evade a commercial, and to fall on another commercial.
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