SiriusXM today released a rebuilt version of its Fish Mapping app, developed by the Herndon, Virginia ocean technology company OceanBytes, and for the first time sold the service's fish-finding data to anglers who do not have a satellite subscription or marine hardware. The release, issued from New York and Herndon at 2:00 PM EST on November 2, 2026, describes weekly and annual standalone tiers without naming a price. Apple's App Store listing for the app does: $24.99 for one week of mobile and desktop access, $199 a year for mobile only, and $299 a year for mobile and desktop. The satellite plan that has carried the service until now costs $109.99 a month on SiriusXM's marine plans page.

In Short

SiriusXM sells a service that uses satellite readings of the ocean, such as water temperature and plankton, to show fishermen where fish are most likely to be. Until today, getting it meant paying about $110 a month for a satellite plan and owning a compatible receiver on a boat, but now anglers with an internet connection can buy the app alone for a week or a year. It is a small product, but it shows SiriusXM again splitting a premium bundle into cheaper, hardware-free pieces, and it leaves open which company's data and AI sit behind the recommendations.

What the app does

According to SiriusXM, the all-new app brings "a significantly enhanced user experience" and runs on both desktop and mobile. The release groups the changes under four headings.

AI and Oceanographer-Driven Recommendations and Hot Zones combine two kinds of guidance. AI-generated Hot Zones, which mark areas the system considers most likely to hold fish, are updated daily. Recommendations curated by oceanographers are updated twice a week. SiriusXM's Fish Mapping product page sets that schedule more precisely for satellite users, with fish recommendations refreshed on Tuesday and Friday mornings.

Expanded Ocean Data Layers cover sea temperature, plankton, salinity, currents, thermocline, altimetry and true color imagery, which SiriusXM says help determine the most probable areas for locating fish. Thermocline, the depth at which water temperature changes sharply, and altimetry, the measurement of sea surface height from orbit, are the less familiar entries for anglers who have used only temperature charts. The product page adds bathymetry, calendar and moon phases, a measuring tool, and routes and waypoints, and it lists dynamic, moving currents as a desktop-only feature.

Front Finder, listed under advanced visualization tools, lets a user adjust filters for specific oceanographic conditions to narrow down likely fishing locations.

Improved Planning Experience is the fourth heading, covering a reworked interface and controls for customizing views and planning trips.

"We talk to the angler community constantly, and their feedback has been consistent: more powerful tools and more flexible access. The all-new Fish Mapping App delivers both," said Geoff Leech, Senior Director, Marine Services, SiriusXM. "With developer OceanBytes, we've significantly enhanced the app by bringing more advanced data and improved insights into a more intuitive experience, and the new standalone subscription options mean Fish Mapping is now available to far more anglers than ever before."

The release does not describe how the AI hot zones are produced. It names no model, no training data, no species coverage and no measure of how often the zones have matched catches. The service's own boilerplate is blunt about the limits: "Finding fish is not guaranteed."

Two ways in

The release sets out two routes to the same app. Existing SiriusXM Marine Fish Mapping satellite subscribers "will continue to receive full mobile access, plus will now receive desktop app access, at no extra cost." Everyone else can buy one of the new standalone tiers, which, according to the release, include "weekly and annual options for non-satellite subscribers." For details, the release points to siriusxm.com/fishmapping.

The satellite plan

On SiriusXM's marine plans page, the Fish Mapping plan is the most expensive of four marine packages. It costs $109.99 a month plus a $25 activation fee, against $17.99 for Inland, $37.99 for Coastal and $64.99 for Offshore. It bundles Fish Mapping with surface temperatures, wind and wave information, radar and lightning, and app access. Satellite radio is sold separately.

The satellite route needs hardware on the boat. The product page lists compatible receivers from five manufacturers: the Garmin GXM 54, the Simrad and Lowrance WM-4, the Raymarine SR200 and the Furuno BBWX4, each tied to specific display models. On the boat's display, the satellite service delivers eight dedicated fishing features. Sea surface temperature contours refresh every three hours, while sea surface height anomaly, subsurface temperatures at 30 meters, plankton concentration, plankton and temperature front strength, and weed lines refresh every 24 hours. SiriusXM currently offers the first month free, with a credit card required.

Coverage for the satellite service is limited. According to the marine plans page, it reaches the contiguous United States, southern Canada and coastal regions up to 150 nautical miles offshore, and it is not available in Alaska or Hawaii.

The app-only tiers

The App Store listing gives three standalone plans:

  • Annual Mobile: $199.00
  • Annual Mobile + Desktop: $299.00
  • 1-Week Mobile + Desktop: $24.99

The annual plans renew automatically. The one-week plans do not, according to the listing, which also states that app-only plans do not include satellite service and that the service is not available in Alaska or Hawaii. Access is limited to two devices.

On PPC Land's arithmetic, a year of the satellite plan at $109.99 a month comes to $1,319.88 before the activation fee and hardware. The $199 mobile tier is about 15% of that, and the $299 mobile and desktop tier about 23%. The weekly pass undercuts the annual plan only for occasional use: eleven weeks cost $274.89, while a twelfth takes the total to $299.88, just above the $299 annual mobile and desktop price. The two products are not equivalent, though. The satellite plan delivers data to a chartplotter at sea, beyond mobile coverage, along with SiriusXM's marine weather. The app-only tiers require an internet connection, which the product page says is needed on both mobile and desktop.

The weekly pass inverts the usual subscription logic. Because it does not renew, every buyer who does not purchase again is lost by construction, so churn is the default rather than a failure. SiriusXM has not said who it expects to buy it, but the structure favors a handful of trips over a full season, and it gives the company a low-cost entry point to the annual tiers.

An app that is not new to the stores

The release calls the app "all-new." The App Store listing, under the seller name OceanBytes Holding LLC, shows a longer history. Version 1.0 is dated July 9, 2023. Version 2.0 followed on June 7, 2024, version 3.0 on March 24, 2025, and version 3.81.1 on August 6, 2025. Version 4.0.0 is listed as released two days before the announcement. The news is therefore a rebuild of an app that has been in the store for more than three years, combined with a change in who can pay for it.

The listing places the app in the Navigation category. On the US store it had four ratings, averaging 4.0 out of 5. The release says the app is available on iOS through the App Store and Android through Google Play "via mobile and desktop app," without naming the desktop operating systems it supports.

Standalone subscriptions sold inside the app stores are processed by Apple and Google, which take a share of each payment. The release does not say whether SiriusXM or OceanBytes sells the app-only tiers directly as well, nor how revenue is divided between the two companies.

OceanBytes, Garmin and the question of whose data

The release presents OceanBytes as the app's developer. According to the release, OceanBytes is "an ocean technology company that uses real-time data, AI-driven insights, and cloud-based tools" for fisheries, maritime organizations and governments. Its main product is OceanFishMap, described as "a globally used service for fishing vessels" that provides recommendations, oceanographic and weather data, catch reporting and emergency messaging.

"Our team has been providing international commercial fisheries with useful oceanographic data for years," said Vipul Prasad, CEO of OceanBytes. "We are thrilled to bring this data to the recreational sportfish market together with SiriusXM."

The release's opening line frames the deal the same way, describing OceanBytes as bringing "powerful, commercial-fisheries-grade oceanographic data to the recreational sportfishing market."

SiriusXM's own marine plans page tells a different story about the data. Its frequently asked questions section, live on the day of the announcement, names Garmin as the provider of Fish Mapping data and credits Garmin's oceanographers with analyzing data layers from multiple sources to identify fishing hot spots. The same page says the data combines NOAA information with government, research, commercial and proprietary sources. It also still states that the Fish Mapping app is not sold separately, which the new tiers make outdated.

The release does not mention Garmin. Neither the release nor the plans page says whether the satellite layers delivered to chartplotters and the layers in the rebuilt app come from the same source, or whether OceanBytes has replaced Garmin as the oceanographic provider for both. For a product sold on the quality of its recommendations, that is a material gap. Whose oceanographers are drawing the zones? Anglers comparing the $299 app tier with competing forecasting services cannot tell from SiriusXM's published materials.

What the release leaves out

Beyond pricing and data provenance, the announcement is thin on figures. It gives no subscriber count for SiriusXM Marine or Fish Mapping, no revenue figure, and no target for the standalone tiers. It does not say whether the standalone app works outside the satellite footprint, although OceanBytes' commercial service is described as global. And it does not explain which features, if any, differ between the satellite subscribers' app and the paid standalone tiers, beyond the mobile and desktop split in the App Store plans.

The release also contains nothing on advertising. There is no mention of ads in the app, of SiriusXM Media, or of any sponsorship. The only reference to the company's advertising business is in its corporate boilerplate.

SiriusXM's pattern of cheaper, hardware-free tiers

Fish Mapping is a niche product inside a company of SiriusXM's size, but the pricing move follows a direction that has run through the company's consumer announcements for more than a year. In July 2025, SiriusXM introduced SiriusXM Play, an ad-supported plan priced under $7 a month with more than 130 channels. In July 2026 it announced Sports Pass at $5 a month or $49 a year for new US subscribers, packaging play-by-play from four major leagues on its own. In October it added every 2026-27 NBA game to that $5 tier. Each product carves a narrower, cheaper subscription out of a broader bundle. Fish Mapping now does the same with marine data, and it goes further by removing the hardware condition entirely.

The context is a subscriber base that has struggled to grow. SiriusXM reported self-pay net additions of minus 111,000 in the first quarter of 2026. In the third quarter, results published on October 29 showed about 5,000 self-pay net additions, against a loss of 40,000 a year earlier, with monthly self-pay churn of about 1.5%. Average revenue per user was $15.18, against $15.19, and SiriusXM attributed part of that flatness to a growing share of value-added and more affordable subscription offerings. Advertising revenue was flat at $456 million.

Selling Fish Mapping as an app-only subscription through Apple and Google is a direct-to-consumer route that does not depend on the marine electronics satellite subscribers must buy from Garmin, Simrad, Lowrance, Raymarine or Furuno. Whether that route reaches enough anglers to matter for SiriusXM's numbers is not something the company has disclosed.

Why it matters for marketers

For subscription businesses, the Fish Mapping pricing is a clean case of tiering by commitment rather than by feature. The weekly pass, the annual mobile plan, the annual mobile and desktop plan and the satellite plan sit at four price points, from $24.99 for a week to $1,319.88 for a year of satellite service, and the lowest tier asks for no renewal at all. SiriusXM's sports and music products have followed similar logic, splitting expensive bundles into cheaper entry points.

The "AI and oceanographer" framing deserves scrutiny too. SiriusXM's corporate description emphasizes "human-curated programming" in its audio business, and the Fish Mapping release pairs daily machine-generated zones with twice-weekly human recommendations. The release offers no evidence on how the two compare in accuracy, or on how often the oceanographers' recommendations and the AI zones agree.

For advertisers who buy SiriusXM Media inventory, the announcement changes nothing directly. The boilerplate repeats that SiriusXM "reaches approximately 255 million monthly listeners across its platforms," the combined figure SiriusXM cited when it announced its audio advertising deal with YouTube in April 2026. In the second quarter, SiriusXM's advertising revenue rose 5% to $454 million.

The data-provenance question reaches beyond fishing. Audience platforms and forecasting tools alike often resell outputs built on data licensed from someone else, and SiriusXM's published materials currently name two different sources for the same product. The brand on the subscription and the company behind the data are not always the same.

Timeline

Summary

Who: SiriusXM, through its SiriusXM Marine division, and OceanBytes, a Herndon, Virginia ocean technology company led by CEO Vipul Prasad that develops the app. Geoff Leech, Senior Director, Marine Services at SiriusXM, is quoted in the release. The product is aimed at saltwater and offshore recreational anglers.

What: A rebuilt Fish Mapping app with daily AI-generated Hot Zones, oceanographer recommendations updated twice a week, expanded ocean data layers and a Front Finder tool. Existing satellite subscribers, who pay $109.99 a month for the Fish Mapping plan, keep mobile access and gain desktop access at no extra cost. New standalone tiers, priced in the App Store at $24.99 for one week of mobile and desktop access, $199 a year for mobile and $299 a year for mobile and desktop, require no satellite plan or hardware. SiriusXM's marine plans page still names Garmin as the Fish Mapping data provider and says the app is not sold separately, while the release credits OceanBytes.

When: Announced today, November 2, 2026, at 2:00 PM EST. Version 4.0.0 of the app appeared in the App Store days earlier; the listing's first version dates to July 9, 2023.

Where: The app is available on iOS and Android, with desktop access. The satellite service covers the contiguous United States, southern Canada and coastal waters up to 150 nautical miles offshore, excluding Alaska and Hawaii. The release does not state the coverage of the standalone tiers.

Why: According to SiriusXM, anglers asked for more powerful tools and more flexible access, and the standalone tiers open the service to anglers without dedicated hardware. The move fits SiriusXM's wider shift toward cheaper, narrower subscriptions, after Sports Pass and SiriusXM Play, at a time when self-pay subscriber growth has been close to flat.