Sirus-XM charges for access to its Sirius Music Player, but for the past few days, some customers can’t get it to work. One of them in this forum says it only connects after Howard Stern is over, and speculates that some cost-cutting measures have reduced available bandwidth, leading to locked-out customers. In another thread customers are complaining that popular third-party streaming radio services have been sent cease-and-desist letters from Sirius, further limiting access to streaming Sirius programming online. Naturally, Sirius-XM hasn’t responded to customer queries about the issue.
Here’s what our tipster Andrew has to say:
Since Sirius-XM has started charging to use their internet streaming, the service has gone down hill. I’ve been having trouble even opening their media player on their website, with it usually saying “Sirius Internet Radio is Temporarily Unavailable”. If I do manage to get it to open and get to the log-in screen, I enter my info and attempt to log-in, then it says something like, “Gateway Timeout”. And now, if I do actually manage to log in and get it to play, the section of the player where you switch channels is now giving me the “Sirius Internet Radio is Temporarily Unavailable” message, despite the fact that I am still listening to the channel I was able to open upon logging in.
I have sent numerous e-mails to Sirius via their website and have gotten no response, and from I have read from other users, calling customer service has to been to no avail either. Maybe a consumerist article on the topic will help shed some light on the problem. This is extremely annoying seeing as when the internet streaming service was free, it worked perfectly fine. I never once had an issue until they switched to making customers pay for it seperately. Just another case of paying more and getting less. So much for that merger being good for consumers.
“Sirius Internet player not connecting” [Digital Radio Central]
“Starplayr & uSirius are no longer available” [Digital Radio Central]
(Thanks to Timothy for the screen shot!)
