James E. Meyer
Analyst · FBR Capital Markets
So I think it's a great question. We certainly, and I think it's very public who it is, are seeing GM roll out LTE in their vehicles at a pretty aggressive rate. The service offering within those vehicles varies, so it's hard yet to answer your question. I don't want to be specific. The technical platform is rolling out. I think GM's implementation of how they want that to work ultimately is still in a variety of phases in their vehicles. But there's no question, built-in connectivity in vehicles is beginning to increase and, I think, will continue to increase every year going forward for many, many years. I think this is an incredible opportunity for SiriusXM. I constantly get questions from analysts and investors about, "Isn't this bad for your business?" And my answer to that question is, are you kidding me? No, it's great for my business because it's going to let me do things that, quite candidly, the network that we architected and grew our -- as the backbone of our business, let's face it, 15, 20 years ago, gets supplemented and complemented with this new network that allows us all of the advantages of our private network, combined with this new 2-way connectivity, and I think it's going to let us do a lot of exciting things for the next 10 years. Your question about can we draw any results yet, I can tell you unequivocally no. Okay? We are watching it carefully. We've seen some different results that, on a very small sample basis, in fact, didn't match what we expected. And what do I mean by that? We've seen some very smart vehicles that have very smart connectivity. And in fact, in those vehicles, our conversion rate's higher, not lower. And so I think on this one, Barton, we're just going to have to wait several months to make sure none of this is a head fake. I've learned now, over the 10 years, we need to watch for several months to see how these trends roll out. But I promise you, we're watching it. And when we think we really understand what's going on, we'll be very public about it.