The long-awaited announcement hit: Howard Stern to stay with SiriusXM through this time in 2020. He re-signed for five years, and came fully loaded, as you can see in the video.
Leading up to today it was anybody’s call. Will he re-sign? If not, where would he go? If he stayed, how long? It was conjecture junction. My guess was 70% he’d stay, and maybe three years, tops. I was actually surprised to hear it’s for another full five years. This would make his reign at Sirius lasting fifteen years through the end of 2020.
But I have to say— the last couple years, to me, it was really looking like he was winding down for the end of his time at Sirius. Two years ago, this month, they 86’d the HowardTV platform, which was a continuance of the E! platform they had back at K-ROCK. Then some people left— including most noticeably Lisa G earlier this year. It was never said what happened with her departure except that Howard made a brief blip on the air that she was no longer there, and Lisa’s been very mum about it— refusing to answer queries through her Facebook & Twitter. She actually doesn’t respond to anyone, really, about anything. She just posts her pictures and videos, and it’s been great to see her doing her thing, but I think she was a nice asset to the show and it sucked to see her go.
According to USA Today, Sirius stock rose today 3% after Stern’s announcement.
One thing I was happy hear, and see with today’s video, is that they’ll be bringing back the video portion of the show. The E! show was good, but very watered down due to it being a television show, but HowardTV was phenomenal. It was uncut and uncensored and it was a big shock that they shut it down two years ago. It was said at the time that Howard was exploring options to put HowardTV on another platform, but that never happened. So since then we’ve settled for the on-again, off-again watching on YouTube. I say on/off because there’s been fits and starts at times where HowardTV (though defunct) had filed DMCA take-down requests to remove them off YouTube. For a while content was dry, but then people started uploading them again. Some were uploaded so much (ie: people downloading other folk’s videos off their channels, etc) that the degradation quality was so apparent on some. Essentially a handful of people had originally ripped the clips off their DVR’s and uploaded them. I had HowardTV (back when I still had cable), and they were the greatest when you caught them off your television set.
I’m not too jazzed about the idea of an app, because I’m hoping it won’t be the only way to see Stern-streamed content. Apparently in addition to the show being streamed, like the old days, they’ll also be making available all the old radio and video segments.
So you know what this means… watch all you can on YouTube for right now. Because you know they’re all comin’ down.
Tommy R. Donovan 