The King of All Media triumphantly returned to his channels in the New Year after signing another deal with Sirius which keeps him on their airwaves for another 5 years guaranteed. Much to the delight of the majority of Howard Stern fans, and shareholders of SiriusXM.

There is one noticeable change in the format to the show. The show is now one hour less, with Robin Quivers starting the news block at 9 a.m. instead of 10. Despite the loud complaining of some fans on Stern Fan Network, this new formatting will actually work well for the show and here is why.

On the shows best days, you will have a great guest on where the interview is rolling along really well. Or, you could have no guest and the show could be on a roll by talking about some major event in the news world and having all of these great humours twists added in to it. On the busy days you have a ton of stuff crammed into a short period of time. What these scenarios do is take listeners up to levels where they are responding well to the humour, taking in the stories and listening to the interviewing. Then because of time constraints the listeners are left wanting more of what was going on.

Many will argue with me that this really is not different than the older formats of the show even dating back to the days on Terrestrial Radio. I suppose there is some truth to this. Think though for a minute if you can. What if the show is having an off day? So far 2011 has started out great for the Stern Show but there will be an off day. Even Howard will admit when he has an off day with the show. You could be listening to the show and the humour is not hitting out of the park like it usually does. Or you are listening to a really drab interview with some idiot who should not be on the show. In these instances listeners have the relief that they now there is a further time constraint now in place. So at some point a seemingly bad part of the show will have to wrap up sooner in order to meet that time deadline.

To the fans who complain, I am just happy to have Howard back and on the air. It is better right now than no Stern show at all.