• by October 28, 2004

14 MONTHS, SEVEN DAYS -- and depending on when you are reading this, a certain number of minutes and seconds. That's how long the countdown on Howard Stern's Web site says he has left on his contract with Viacom's Infinity Broadcasting unit.

It's also how long it will take before Stern - an earthbound radio star by most anyone's account - joins the constellation of radio personae being launched into space by satellite radio providers XM and Sirius, Stern's new FCC-proof home.

Even so, it was interesting to hear Stern baiting Michael Powell this week, challenging the FCC commissioner's qualifications for the federal government's top media job, and going so far as to imply it was a function of nepotism.

"You're the judge. You're the arbiter. You're the one who tells us what we can and can't say on the air. And yet I really don't even think you're qualified to be the head of the commission. Do you deny that your father got you this job," challenged Stern when he called into a radio show that Powell was being interviewed on.

Stern, of course, was referring to the fact that Powell's dad is Secretary of State Colin Powell, a key member of the Bush Administration. He also expressed his outrage and concern that the FCC was singling out Stern's show as a scapegoat for broadcast indecency. The commission recently levied record fines against Infinity related to Stern's show.

"I would deny it exceedingly. You can look at my resume if you want, Howard. I'm not ashamed of it and I think it justifies my existence," Powell told Stern in response to his allegation, noting that he had also served as the chief of staff of the Justice Department's Antitrust Division and was a private attorney before being named FCC commissioner.

"You personalize it as if you're answering to me," Powell continued. "You're answering to the commission, if you're answering to anybody. All of these fines are voted by five members, Republicans and Democrats alike."

We can only guess why Stern would provoke Powell with more than a year left on his Infinity contract. Perhaps he wants to increase the pressure enough that Infinity simply asks him to go, thereby freeing Stern to launch into orbit that much sooner.

More likely, Stern recognizes that once he launches, he will be operating in a new media frontier that is out of the reach of federal regulators. Well, in 14 months, seven days, and a certain number of minutes and seconds, anyway.

Until Stern announced he was moving his brand of radio amplitude into a higher spectral altitude, we considered many of the forecasts for the satellite radio business to be, well, pie in the sky. Now we're starting to believe that the sky may, in fact, be the limit for the radio medium.

And it's not just the ascent of the King of All Media, but a number of other recent developments - especially the release of a new report by Magna Global USA - that are causing us to glance upward, cock an ear, and listen a little more carefully.

What we're hearing, from Magna, at least, is that satellite radio will "reinvigorate an otherwise lackluster" radio industry, and ultimately will prove to be a benefit, not a threat to national and local advertisers.

"Although the radio industry faces many secular problems, satellite radio should not be viewed as one of them," writes Brian Wieser, Magna's media economist, and author of the report, "Satellites of Love: Nadir of the Radio Industry."

Poetics aside, we consider Wieser's tome to be more than the usual polemics. Mainly, because it is so well thought out, and because of its implications for Madison Avenue, which Wieser thinks are mainly good, for both national and local advertisers, and for two primary reasons:

"Satellite radio provides a competitive push to local station groups. As a result of deregulatory policies, local station groups are effectively organized as oligopolies, which would otherwise face reduced levels of direct competition. As [satellite radio] becomes more prevalent, local radio stations will be forced to improve their product in order to limit listener losses."

"By the time [satellite radio] becomes more widely penetrated, we expect XM and Sirius will ultimately increase their commercial inventory, offering national advertisers the ability to target specific psychographic and demographic groups on a national platform, which in turn will offer competition for syndicators who are today's primary suppliers of national radio advertising."

In other words, satellite radio is just the kick in the butt that the overall radio industry needs to get the medium back on track - with listeners, and with advertisers. But we think it will be more than that. In a broader sense, satellite radio will be for the terrestrial radio industry what the digital video recorder has been for television: a disruptive technology that changes the way consumers interact with the medium.

Like DVRs, satellite radio is one of those mediums you have to experience to understand. And in the way that DVRs aren't simply a souped-up VCR, neither is satellite radio just a fancier radio receiver.

What both technologies have in common, is that they're digital, which provides a higher quality media experience, but also one that can be more easily manipulated - by consumers, programmers, advertisers, and agencies.

Think about it, there already are millions of cars receiving digital bits of data via satellite radio receivers, but who's to say that data necessarily has to be an audio output? Sure the technology is called digital audio radio service, but from what we understand, it could just as easily render content that's interpreted as video, or text, or anything a sender or receiver could imagine.

Already, Sirius and XM are floating the concept of a new, smaller version of satellite radio receivers that individuals could carry with them, or wear tucked inside their shirt pockets in much the same way other individuals are now plugging into iPods.

And just as iPods are transforming from digital music players, into photo storage devices, and ultimately video players, we suspect satellite radio receivers ultimately will be capable of receiving more than what some would envision as a radio signal.

And if the Magna team has crunched its numbers right, there should be something on the order of 20 million of those receivers out there within just five years.

Like Howard Stern, we'll be counting down the months, days, minutes, and seconds.