Absent one-time charges, the company broke even for the quarter. Analysts had been expecting a two-cent loss on revenue of $609 million.

Good news, but it was tempered with a bit of bad. Because Sirius’s (SIRI) subscriber growth is slowing. The company ended the quarter with 18.5 million total subscribers. That’s up 103,000 from the second quarter, but down 2.1 percent from a year earlier.

“We are very pleased with what we accomplished during the third quarter, especially when considering the macroeconomic issues affecting consumers and the auto industry,” Sirius CEO Mel Karmazin said in a statement.

“We managed to grow revenue, grow ARPU, reduce operating costs, increase adjusted income from operations significantly, and refinance higher cost debt,” Karmazin added. “We look forward to continuing this performance. We grew subscribers and improved churn in the quarter, and we are well positioned to take advantage of an economic rebound. We expect to grow subscribers, revenue, and cash flow next year regardless of the magnitude of any recovery.”

Apple TV 3.0 is largely as rumored: Adding support for Internet radio, Genius Mixes, iTunes LP and iTunes Extras (bonus clips, interviews, etc.). But it boasts another new feature as well: A redesigned user interface.

Whether the debut of Apple TV 3.0 heralds a hardware refresh of the device itself is anyone’s guess. It is worth noting, though, that there’s been quite a bit of speculation recently that Cupertino is working on an overhauled device that will offer DVR capabilities and support iTunes TV show subscriptions.

As Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster wrote back in August: “Apple could leverage its deep library of content with many network and cable channel content owners to provide unlimited access to a sub-library of its TV shows for a standard monthly fee ($30 or $40 per month).”

According to Munster, “Such a product would effectively replace a consumer’s monthly cable bill (~$85/month) and offer access to current and older episodes of select shows on select channels. The selection would dictate the value, and several tiers could be offered, but we see this as one way for Apple to leverage its large iTunes content library as well as its unique Apple TV hardware in order to get digital video to the TV for a price significantly less than the average cable or satellite TV bill.”

Sounds sweet, right? And it would be sweeter still if it were to offer App Store support and allow users to control games and other apps via iPhone or iPod touch …

Below, the official Apple (AAPL) release:

Apple Introduces Apple TV 3.0 Software With Redesigned User Interface

Enjoy iTunes Extras, iTunes LP & Genius Mixes on Your HD TV

CUPERTINO, Calif., Oct. 29 — Apple® today introduced new Apple TV® 3.0 software featuring a redesigned main menu that makes navigating your favorite content simpler and faster, and makes enjoying the largest selection of on-demand HD movie rentals and purchases, HD TV shows, music and podcasts from the iTunes® Store even better on your TV. You can now enjoy iTunes Extras and iTunes LP in stunning fullscreen with your Apple TV, as well as listen to Genius Mixes and Internet radio through your home theater system. The new Apple TV software is available immediately free of charge to existing Apple TV owners, and Apple TV with 160GB capacity is available for just $229.

“The new software for Apple TV features a simpler and faster interface that gives you instant access to your favorite content,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president of Internet Services. “HD movies and HD TV shows from iTunes have been a huge hit with Apple TV customers, and with Apple TV 3.0 they get great new features including iTunes Extras, Genius Mixes and Internet radio.”

The redesigned main menu on Apple TV gives you instant access to your favorite content. Recently rented or purchased movies, as well as other content including TV shows, music, podcasts, photos and YouTube, are accessible directly from the new main menu. The new software also allows Apple TV users to enjoy stunning fullscreen iTunes Extras and iTunes LP, including great new movie titles such as “Star Trek” or classics like “The Wizard of Oz” and albums such as Taylor Swift’s “Fearless (Platinum Edition)” and Jack Johnson’s “En Concert.” iTunes Extras gives movie fans great additional content such as deleted scenes, interviews and interactive galleries. iTunes LP is the next evolution of the music album, delivering a rich, immersive experience for select albums on the iTunes Store by combining beautiful design with expanded visual features like live performance videos, lyrics, artwork, liner notes, interviews, photos, album credits and more.

Now Apple TV users can enjoy Genius Mixes through their home theater system and listen to up to 12 endless mixes of songs that go great together, automatically generated from their iTunes library. Customers can also enjoy Internet radio, allowing them to browse and listen to thousands of Internet radio stations, as well as tag favorite stations to listen to later. Apple TV’s support of HD photos is enhanced with iPhoto Events, which simplifies finding your favorite photos on Apple TV, as well as iPhoto® Faces, which gives access to photos organized by people identified in iPhoto.

Apple TV users have direct access to a catalog of over 8,000 Hollywood films on iTunes including over 2,000 in stunning HD video available for rent or purchase. Users can also choose from a selection of 11 million songs, 10,000 music videos and over 50,000 TV episodes to purchase directly from their Apple TV or browse and enjoy the iTunes Store podcast directory of over 175,000 free video and audio podcasts. Purchases downloaded to Apple TV are automatically synced back to iTunes on the user’s computer for enjoyment on their Mac® or PC or all current generation iPods or iPhones.* iPod touch® or iPhone® users can download the free Remote app from the App Store to control their Apple TV with a simple tap or flick of the finger.

During a call with analysts Thursday to discuss second-quarter earnings, Sirius CEO Mel Karmazin said the app, which is currently the iTune App Store’s fourth most popular app in the music category and the 88th most popular overall, was intended more as a means of tempering subscriber churn than a means of driving new subscriptions.

“…unlike an awful lot of applications on the iPhone…we’re not offering free service,” Karmazin said. “What we are offering is the free download and a week’s trial, so this was never designed that we believe we were going to get a significant number of new subscribers. We are seeing an increase in the number of subscribers who are signing up for the $2.99 fee, to be able to stream the product in addition to having it, so a satellite radio subscriber who also has an iPhone is now able to do that with an incremental $2.99.”

So the app is bringing in some new revenue. How much isn’t clear though, since Sirius doesn’t break iPhone app numbers (subscribers or revenue) out. Karmazin admits, however, that it’s not much. “You should not consider them to be a very significant number related to our number of subscribers,” he said, adding, “It’s the right thing for us to do, we continue to believe in it, we’ll continue to do more of these things.”

“Chrysler’s bankruptcy and announced factory shut-down will impact second quarter numbers by reducing the number of prepaid bundled subscriptions associated with the production and shipment of new cars,” Jim Meyer, Sirius’s President of Operations and Sales, said during a conference call last week. “There will be a noticeable hit to subscribers in the second quarter, as a result of these production halts.”

A noticeable hit. What does that mean? Sirius didn’t say at the time, but a filing the company made with the SEC today gives us a clearer picture–and it’s not a pretty one. Chrysler sent quite a bit of new business Sirius’s way. From the Risk Factors item in the company’s 10-Q filing:

We do not expect to generate a significant number of new subscribers from Chrysler while its plants are closed. During the year ended December 31, 2008, Chrysler produced approximately 900,000 vehicles which included a satellite radio and a prepaid subscription to our service. These subscribers represented approximately 16% of our gross subscriber additions in 2008.”

 
Now, there’s no telling how long the Chrysler factory shutdown will last, so it’s impossible to know how much of an impact it will have on Sirius. That said, if the company’s bankruptcy proceedings drag on for any length of time, it obviously does not bode well for Sirius, especially since XM is potentially facing a similar scenario with General Motors (GM). Again, from the Sirius 10-Q:

There is also significant uncertainty surrounding General Motors’ future and potential filing for bankruptcy protection. A bankruptcy filing by General Motors could have similar effects on our subsidiary, XM.

And that would be grim news indeed. Because while Sirius has stopped counting on its auto partnerships to drive sales, it hasn’t yet established other means of driving subscriptions.

“I’m just not cool enough to be a Mac person.”

– Lauren from Microsoft’s new “Laptop Hunters” commercial

With Microsoft’s February share of the search market weighing in at a paltry 8.2 percent and declining, the company has gone to extraordinary lengths to reverse the public’s indifference to its search offering. It tried a loyalty program called Cashback–“We are ‘The Search That Pays You Back!’” It tried a rewards program called SearchPerks, as well–“Start earning tickets towards exciting prizes whenever you search the Web!” Neither seems to have done much good.

Now, as it prepares to rebrand its search engine under a new name–Kumo–Microsoft (MSFT) is redoubling its marketing efforts with more proven methods. The company has hired ad agency JWT to create an estimated $80 million to $100 million ad campaign covering TV, online, print and radio. “According to one person close the situation, the forthcoming campaign will be careful to not position ‘Kumo’ as a competitor to Yahoo or Google and instead cast it as a reimagined search engine that ups the game by yielding fewer but more-focused results,” reports Ad Age, adding that such a strategy “is probably a good–if not the only–way to go.”

That said, if Kumo purports to be a “reimagined” search engine, it does seem to be lacking a bit in imagination. Certainly from what we’ve seen of it, Kumo doesn’t seem all that different from Google (GOOG). In fact, with its spartan design and goofy name, it arguably shares more similarities with the search sovereign than before. But then, perhaps, that’s the point. Perhaps what Microsoft is doing here is not reimagining Live Search as an entirely new game-changing service, but reimagining it as Google in hopes that we’ll forget its sad history as a failed Microsoft search product and reimagine it as a successful one.

What’s more, the company reaffirmed its 2009 revenue estimate of $2.7 billion. Quite a victory for Karmazin, who’s been facing a fair bit of shareholder discontent and more than a few calls for his ouster.

Searing claims. Unfortunately for Save Sirius and its founder Michael Hartleib, they’re far too lacking in specificity for a court to take them seriously. “The majority of Mr. Hartleib’s arguments to show the futility of making a demand on the current Sirius board are based on generalized, not specific allegations,” Judge Cormac J. Carney wrote in an order dismissing the suit. “Although the complaint identifies alleged fraud and wrongdoing committed by Defendants, it does not state how each specific Sirius director was responsible for those actions.”

Hartleib, for his part, was unfazed by the dismissal. “The case is not over at all,” he said. “We have twenty days to resubmit, and we shall.”

As of this writing SIRI was trading at $.15, about double its 52-week low.

RIAA Sues Radio Stations for Giving Away Free Music

–Headline from satirical newspaper The Onion, Oct. 2, 2002

Talk about life imitating The Onion …

Apparently the recording industry’s institutional memory is about as solid as its crumbling business model. As recently as 2007, it was paying radio stations to play its music. Today, it’s accusing them of pirating it. Yersterday, the ironically named recording industry group musicFIRST demanded that broadcasters pay royalties for the music they play over the radio, dismissing as a red herring their claims that radio airplay is a form of free promotion.

And to illustrate that point, the group sent the National Association of Broadcasters a can of herring and a dictionary. Some clever folks over there at musicFIRST.

“[AM-FM broadcasting is] a form of piracy, if you will, but not in the classic sense as we think of it,” Martin Machowsky, a musicFirst spokesman told Wired. “Today we gifted them a can of herring, about their argument that they provide promotional value. We think that’s a red herring. Nobody listens to the radio for the commercials.”

Well, he got that much right. Nobody does listen to the radio for the commercials. They listen for the music. And there was a time when record labels paid broadcasters to play it. They even coined a word for the practice: payola.

In an astonishingly unimaginative report called “The Future of Apple Inc.,” Forrester attempts to divine the products Apple will be peddling five years from now. “Apple will aim to become the hub of the digital home, offering eight key products and services to connect PCs and digital content to the HDTV-stereo audio-visual infrastructure in consumers’ homes,” Forrester explains. “To fulfill this strategy, we predict that Apple will launch new products, re-engineer the Apple Store, and expand into in-home installation services.”

Sadly, the speculative product and services roadmap Forrester has devised seems more a roadmap to ruin than anything else, and a laughable one at that. Among the products the company sees Apple developing by 2013:

• A network-enabled “clock radio”
• An AppleSound universal music controller
• A digital picture frame
• A “Genius Bar” that makes house calls just like the Geek Squad.

Huh. So Apple, after reinventing the desktop UI, the digital media player, and the phone, will set its sights on the lowly clock radio and picture frame. Really? If Apple’s product dev team pitched Forrester’s clock radio idea to CEO Steve Jobs, he would probably hurl them one-by-one into rush-hour traffic from the roof of 1 Infinite Loop.