Sirius XM could veer off road to fuel growth

Sirius XM is looking beyond the dashboard to drive growth.

The company, which depends heavily on subscribers getting their satellite-radio receivers in their cars, is interested in becoming a bigger player in the Internet-based streaming space.

Liberty Media-backed Sirius is watching the growth of other streaming music services and is mulling its next move, according to Liberty boss Greg Maffei.

“We are watching what happens in streaming,” he said at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference on Thursday. “Taking Sirius unique content beyond the car in the home and in the office, it’s an opportunity we’ve not yet attacked.”

Sirius subscribers who prefer to listen the service on their mobile devices can get a stand-alone Internet radio package for $14.99 a month. The “all-access” package, including in-car listening, costs $18.99.

Increasingly, Sirius is competing with Internet music services such as Pandora and Spotify that can be easily accessed from any mobile device and are making inroads into the car category as well.

Sirius boasts hundreds of audio channels with content ranging from niche music to Howard Stern’s talk radio show.

Maffei, who portfolio of media assets runs the gamut from Charter Communications to Live Nation, among others, also weighed in on the future of TV distribution and content business.

For example, forthcoming Internet-based TV streaming services from Dish Network and Sony, among others, are like “techtonic plates clashing,” he said.

They threaten to put programmers who want to keep the traditional pay-TV model in place on a collision course with distributors that want to cut costs and experiment with smaller broadband packages, according to Maffei.