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Satellite radio companies Sirius and XM Radio have decided to merge, and I think that’s a good thing. Of course, traditional radio broadcasters, the NAB, and their lobbyists think that the merger means that there will be a satellite radio “monopoly”. Congress has been holding hearings and holding up the merger, thanks to all the radio lobbyists.

Fortunately now it’s time for the public to weigh in on this. The FCC said that it is opening up public comments on the merger. You can submit comments electronically, or through snail mail.

I’m a Sirius subscriber and I frankly don’t think there’s a big deal about this merger. If Sirius and XM merge will the price go up? It’s possible. But I already invested money in paying for the hardware, and pay a monthly fee, so I’m ok if prices go up. Some have said that the companies may even introduce tiered pricing. If so, that’s definitely a vote yes for the merger.

When the satellite companies were formed, the bandwidth was split between the two companies. If they merge, they can combine that bandwidth and deliver lots of next-gen media services.

Don’t make the mistake of being short-sighted about the XM-Sirius deal. For now, satellite radio is all that’s at stake. But with a combined company, and a full satellite spectrum, the combined company can roll out additional services such as: TV/video, mapping and GPS. Maybe in the future, that means Internet access. Audio is just one piece of the pie. Wouldn’t you like to have one device in your car that delivers TV, radio, GPS and more?

Plus don’t forget that XM and Sirius also have web sites where subscribers can listen over the Internet too.

Radio stations are scared. They don’t want more competition. Research company eMarketer announced recently that online advertising will surpass radio advertising revenues by 2008.

They are trying anything to get this deal stopped.

In fact, the head of the NAB just sent the CEO of Sirius a letter saying to back off the merger.

Well, I guess it’s worth a try.

A brand new peer-to-peer company called Oversi announced that it received funding from Cisco, totaling $8 million. Other investors include Carmel Ventures, StageOne Ventures and TempoPark Fund.

Now here’s the interesting thing: It’s impossible to know what Oversi is really doing. The press release talked about peer to peer streaming and caching. Their website was equally vague. The title bar on their website says “P2P Caching for ISPs”.

The ‘About Us” page says this:

Oversi offers innovative solutions for P2P networks in today’s fast-growing Internet TV and video age. Oversi’s solutions enable ISPs to optimize their network performance, ease P2P traffic pressure and save on bandwidth. The same Oversi platform also helps ISPs to increase revenues and enhance user stickiness through new value-added-services, such as premium content delivery and online storage.

The press release says that using Oversi’s P2P solutions, “service providers can deliver up to 20 times more bandwidth using their existing infrastructures, instead of investing billions of dollars in expensive upgrades.”

Lots of PR gobbledy-gook. For a better explanation, here’s what Light Reading had to say:

Here’s how it works: Oversi’s servers, or peers, form a grid in the operator’s network, catching and caching any video content that is transported in a P2P format (like BitTorrent). Every time a user downloads a P2P file, pieces of that file are stored at Oversi’s servers. When another user on the network requests the same file, it’s accessed from Oversi “peers” close by rather than from the far-away server where the file originated, which would eat more bandwidth and take longer.

Seems like Oversi is good at attracting investors, however. In December, the company had its second round funding for $6 million. That’s $14 million in just about 7 months.

CommuniGate Systems will launch a “unified communications platform” based on Adob’s Flash technology on Tuesday. The system, called Pronto, ties email, calendaring, IM, voice, music, and video into one cool web application.

The company says you can use it in place of your traditional email software, or even iTunes.

Pronto is available for ISPs, corporations and other service providers that want to provide this service for their customers. A free live trial is also available.

CommuniGate says that in the future it can add new things such as Flash-based games, voicemail, VOIP or even IPTV by being ported to mobile phonea, or a set top box.

To get a better idea of what it looks like, take a look at this Pronto demo.

Here are some screen shots of a video:

Here’s a general screen shot. Notice the different panes, including e-mail, IM, music in one interface.