What's more fun that beating a dead horse? I don't know, I'd have to stop beating this one to find out, and I have just one more shot in me.

Although I promised myself I would write more about the technical details and design patterns of good websites in these next few weeks, the XM/Sirius merger (not yet approved by government bigwigs, of course) has been one of the few radio industry stories to get a lot of play outside of our world, and I wanted to take a swing at it.

The interesting thing about the merger is that most of the articles refer to it as a "satellite radio" merger. If you've been reading my columns the past few weeks, you know that satellite is only a delivery method, and in the next few years, delivery methods will become less and less important.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how the delivery method for audio is changing rapidly. We still have a few years before high speed wireless internet becomes common and simple, but that time draws closer every day. As cellular companies build out their 3G and 4g networks, their customers will be able to get internet access fast enough to stream audio through their phone. Right now, Sprint and Verizon already have networks that are rolling out that can give users over 400kbps (kilobits per second, or about 50 Kilobytes per second). If these networks are reliable (and that's a big if) those customers have enough bandwidth to stream any audio over their phone to wherever they are.

There's still the big step of connecting the cell phone to the car stereo, but as more and more people want Auxiliary inputs in their car stereos for iPods and the like, it will be less of a step to simply connect a phone's audio out to the car stereo.

What about the IPhone? Initially, there was some talk of Apple's new iPhone being able to handle internet audio streaming - but as people began to look at its specifications, they realized that the iPhone is not made for online streaming - at least not yet. The iPhone connects to the internet via Cingular's EDGE network, which can only reliably deliver 70 to 80 kbps, and that's not enough for streaming audio. If you want songs on your iPhone, you need to still use iTunes and rip them from a CD or buy them from Apple.