Free Stern Sites Made to Pay
Free speech advocate Howard Stern never said he was in favor of a free ride.
Stern's new bosses at Sirius Satellite Radio have cracked down on at least two Websites that were streaming the talk host's new subscriber-only show. Additionally, they've reported incidents of pirate radio abuse to Stern's old foes at the Federal Communications Commission.
"We have no reason to believe that it's diverting subscriptions as we speak," Sirius spokesman Patrick Reilly said Thursday of the underground activity. "But we take it seriously, and we will enforce with all due measure."
Efforts to hear Stern for free apparently began the moment Stern went pay.
Stern's satellite radio show, available to Sirius' 3.3 million customers who pay $12.95 a month for the service, launched Jan. 9. Four days later, the New York Daily News reported that pirates had taken over one FM frequency in Brooklyn, and one FM frequency in New Jersey, and broadcast Stern's show over the stations' free-of-charge airwaves.
Despite the breach, the Stern pirates didn't exactly wave their flags high. In the Daily News, Eric Johnson, the program director at the hacked New Jersey station, said a lack of listener calls indicated "the pirate must have been working in a small area."
On his Jan. 13 show, Stern reacted to the news by marveling at the amount of time some people (read: the pirates) have on their hands, according to a play-by-play account of the broadcast at MarksFriggin.com.
The other reported incidents of Stern siphoning occurred at two now defunct Websites, HearHoward100.com and HearHoward.org.
"We apologize for any inconvenience we caused anyone. We were just trying to help people," a message at HearHoward.org reads. "However we were in the wrong."
In the Jan. 20 Boston Herald, the unidentified HearHoward.org administrator sounded a more defiant note. Noting that the site itself wasn't making any money off the streaming, the administrator told the paper, "I don't think that they [Sirius, presumably] should be charging someone to listen to their service, especially...people who don't have the access to the service."
Sirius saw the sites' efforts as "blatant and willful infringements," per a Jan. 18 letter as posted on HearHoward.org. The company demanded the audio streams be removed "immediately." By Jan. 19, the HearHoward100.com domain name was being auctioned off--"CHEAP"--on eBay.
Shut down Web streams or no, Stern's audience pool could be twice as big by the end of the year. That's because Sirius estimates its number of paying U.S. customers will surpass 6 million before 2007.
In Canada, Stern's satellite show will debut on Sirius' service there on Monday. According to the Toronto Star, Sirius Canada gave the go-ahead after making sure a channel blocker would be available to customers who don't ever want to hear the radio host--even if they are paying for the right.
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