Category: Help Center

Improving Radio Player Performance at Streema

Posted on by Streema Team

Following the improvements we mentioned in our previous blog post, now we’re back with more news about our player – after all, Streema is about playing radio and TV. 🙂

Before we start, something important to mention is that, as we’ve explained before, Streema does not provide the streaming service, but rather it provides the platform for tuning in to stations. However, in many cases we’re not able to play a radio or TV station because there’s a broken stream or because we don’t find compatible players. Here are some figures to explain that better:

For our Radio Desktop users*, last month (August 2013) 70.3% of them were able to play a radio station, while that number was only 57.6% a year ago (August 2012).

*These figures do not include external players – if they did,
the percentage of successful tune ins would be much higher.

 

To do so, a big part of the work was fixing and updating thousands of streams. Additionally, we have also improved how the plugins work as well as the number of plugins supported – for example, last year 13.4% of our users couldn’t play a station because a of plugin compatibility issue, today that number is only 6.1%.

As you might know, a plugin is a software that allows, in our case, to play a station in your browser, so part of our job is to find plugins that will make the audio and video work on your desktop, tablet, or smartphone.

All this has been the result of both testing and measuring better as well as understanding the behavior of our users. Thanks for listening and watching!

Hopefully in the not so distant future we’ll have a chance to share some data regarding mobile as well as TV.

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

You talk, we listen – fixing user pain points

Posted on by Streema Team

In our quest to bring you a better product at Streema, over the past few months we’ve been spending more and more time talking to our users to learn about their pain points while using our service.

So we emailed our registered users and also used a live chat client called Olark to communicate with our non registered visitors. These were the most recurring answers:

1) “I can’t listen to a particular station”
2) “I have issues looking for stations”
3) “I can’t access the whole Streema directory on my mobile device”

As for the first issue, not being able to listen to a particular station, this is the most complicated one. It can be caused by several different reasons, and here are some of them:

  • Required plugins are missing which are needed to get our player to work.
  • Codecs that the stations use aren’t supported.
  • Streams have changed recently and we don’t have the latest one.
  • Stations aren’t streaming online anymore or simply aren’t broadcasting at all.
  • Geographical restrictions exist, likely due to location-specific licensing issues.
  • Connectivity issues happen while trying to listen to a station.
  • Listener capacity is full.
  • And the list goes on…

So what are we doing about all these issues? Our technical team is currently working on adding new codec capabilities to our player, but it is very difficult to support ALL the codecs that exist, so it might take a while to get your favorite station to work on Streema.

Also, our content team is currently working together with radio station owners to keep our database up-to-date, with as many working streams as possible. And of course, we are constantly upgrading our infrastructure to service our growing user base.

The truth is that there are many issues and since it is almost impossible to solve them all of them immediately we arrived at the conclusion that it is essential to communicate WHY you can’t listen to your favorite station and WHAT you need to do in order to listen to it. That is why we’ll be working hard on enhancing our player’s notifications to the user. And by doing so, we can continue to build Streema as the go-to website for listening to broadcast radio.

As for the second biggest pain point, which is to be able to easily find stations, we have something in the works. As we mentioned on our previous post, we are currently working on a restyle of Streema’s website for desktop users, and as a part of this process we are re-thinking and improving how our users discover radio stations. We will have some news really soon! 🙂

And finally, regarding our mobile users, we will continue to build a better mobile browser version while we start planning our next move. Who knows, there might be something ‘native’ in our near future… 😉

Thanks once again for your feedback, and please, be patient, we are working hard to improve our player and we really look forward to have the best listening experience on the web.

That’s all for now. Please do let us know what you think!

The Streema Team

The New Help Center – Communicating better with you, our user

Posted on by Streema Team

At Streema we want to build a better product – and a big part of that is to listen to your needs, suggestions and feedback. To do so, we recently launched the new Help Center.

The Help Center is at its core a selection of “frequently asked questions” divided in sections plus some other useful information. And if you don’t find what you’re looking for, you can still contact us directly! Additionally, we’re trying out a few different features like offering instant support (i.e. chat window) and allowing users to publish public questions. Let us know what you think of these!

Bonus: for mobile browser users, we’ve prepared a custom mobile FAQ where you should find most of your answers. 😉

In case you want to know a little bit more about the technical implementation, we used Desk to develop the Help Center and Olark for the instant support.

Anyway, that’s all for now. We really hope you can now find better answers to your questions while having an improved experience at Streema.

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team