"I am not married,” said Stern. “It's a nice feeling that we get along great. We're very happy and I don't want to (expletive) it up.”
Stern, who is finally free of government decency laws on Sirius Satellite Radio Inc., has promised his new show will include everything from stripper poles to live sex. Monday’s show included phone sex with Playboy bunny Heidi Cortez, who has her own phone-sex nighttime show lined up on Sirius. Stern also introduced George Takei as his new on-air personality. Takei, who played Sulu on "Star Trek" and who last year publicly announced he is gay, will serve as announcer and after the first week will record segments for the show but will not be in the studio.
Stern broadcast his last FM radio show on Dec. 16 as thousands of fans gathered outside his New York City studio. At the time his October 2004 deal with Sirius was announced, the company said it could be worth up to $500 million over five years to headline two Sirius channels. Even prior to the first show, the radio porn king recruited listeners for the $13-per-month service, as the Sirius audience expanded from 600,000 at the time the switch was announced to more than 3.3 million subscribers, Stern said Monday. During that time frame, Sirius stock also has roughly doubled.
The craze is hardly a surprise, given Stern's wildly popular syndicated show proved a cash cow for Infinity Broadcasting, now the CBS Radio unit of CBS Corp., raking in about $100 million in annual advertising revenues and capturing 12 million listeners with raunchy, boundary-pushing programming.
During his 25-year run on the public airwaves, Stern was frequently in conflict with the Federal Communications Commission, and his morning show was often interrupted by censors. Weeks after Janet Jackson's Super Bowl "wardrobe malfunction," Clear Channel Communications Inc. yanked Stern from six stations amid an FCC crackdown. Stern signed with Sirius five months later.
"I thought Clear Channel and companies like that were going to fight the FCC," Stern said. "I kept hanging around. And they never fought back. They are cowards. They bow and they deserve to be destroyed."
During the on-air news conference, Stern was asked how he felt about listeners having to pay to hear his new show.
"I believe that people will pay for radio," he said. "It's everything iPod can't be. IPod can't give you content and we can."
