• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, December 1, 2006

Live TV could be in your car by 2007--but the sad news is that you'll still have to keep your eyes on the road.

Sirius Satellite Radio plans to offer live television service---but only for the back seat. I don't know why. Distraction is all around us. Talking on cell phones has already upped the accidents. Why not make it a real free-for-all? Better still, why not place a holographic see-through image on the windshield?

All this will give TV marketers the chance again to use the expression "anywhere, anytime the consumer wants it." Sirius couldn't let those savvy executives down now, could they?

Of course, if you are really stuck in traffic, I can imagine the driver sneaking a peek into the back seat.

In a separate but related story, Major League Baseball is moving against this big trend by holding back a much-discussed Baseball Channel. MLB is progressing much more slowly with this idea than did baseball's major sports competitors, the NFL and the NBA, both of which have cable channels. The NFL Network is the biggest, with 41 million homes; NBA TV has 12 million homes.

One wonders what the MLB would offer on the Baseball Channel, since many of its local team games are spoken for.  Possibly regular season MLB games coming into your market for another city's team.  Those games historically are ratings losers. Perhaps the channel would carve up another national game package. 

MLB isn't thinking grandiose. It would put on winter leagues, the draft, the Arizona Fall League, any new international business, special games or leagues MLB may start up, and the new World Baseball Classic, where players team up with their respective countries of origin. All in all, not exactly front-seat programming.

Sirius looks to be front and center, through--trying to get the jump on its bigger competitor XM Satellite Radio with its addition of video to its audio selections. One would imagine back-seat viewing would be mostly kids viewing; Nickelodeon and the Cartoon Network would be enough.

Baseball skews to a much older audience than the NBA or NFL--not exactly 18-49 mile- per-hour viewing. Better stick with the audio-only: radio in the front and back seats. All of this makes sense in our fast-moving video world.