The Streema Blog

Hi!  Given that the holiday season is almost here, we wanted to talk about a holiday-related genre that has started to get more relevance on our radio station directory recently: Christmas.

Christmas is a music genre that, independently of the country you live in or the community you belong to, we think is worth checking out because of the peace and happiness that it brings at this time of the year. :)

According to our own radio popularity rankings, these are the top Christmas Radio Stations on Streema:

• Happy Christmas Radio
• Christmas Music 24/7
• Planet Christmas

Feel free to enjoy these and other radio stations this holiday season!

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

Early last week we posted that we were working on a Song Information Aggregator.  Well, we got so excited that we decided to work on it a whole lot more and… we’re proud to announce that our initial DEMO of the feature is now available on both our website and Facebook applications!!

We wanted to give our blog readers a sneak preview of this feature, which is now live, but will not be widely promoted yet.  So, when you are listening to a radio station that displays the name of the song on our player’s screen, just click on the name of the song and we’ll take you to the DEMO.  To quickly try it out, here are a few stations that have easily accessible* song information:

- Power Hitz: Top 40 - Hip Hop - Rap

- 181.FM Rock 40: Rock - Adult Contemporary

- ETN.fm Progressive Channel ETN2: Electronica - House

In addition, once you’re on the Song Information Aggregator page, you can search for any other “Artist - Song” by using the search box on that page. For a quick example, click on any of the following songs:

- Lady Gaga - Just Dance

- Metro Station - Shake It

- AC/DC - Back In Black

And for those of you that are interested in the tech stuff, the development consisted of integrating YouTube, Twitter, and LyricWiki APIs.

We really think we can improve this much more, so please send us all the comments you may have about it. Bear in mind this is only a DEMO, so you might find some (or many) things that don’t work as expected. Hope you enjoy it, and as we’ve said, we’d love to hear your feedback!

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

* Not all the radio stations in our directory may have this feature working - for more information, please, check our FAQ #4 .

At Streema, we are always thinking ahead and trying new things. Today we bring a sneak preview of something we’re developing, related to the song that is displayed on our player.  We thought you might like to check out. :D

It happens often that we hear a cool song while listening to radio on Streema - we then leave our site to search for that song’s video (likely on YouTube), look up its lyrics, and even wonder what people have been “saying” about it.

So, we asked ourselves:  why not build something simple that does that directly on Streema?  The result is the Song Info Aggregator:  meaningful + real time information.

(click over the image to enlarge)

What you see above is just a picture - it can and will evolve - so if you have some additional ideas about it, please let us know!  We’ll keep you posted in the near future as this cool feature makes it onto our site.

Disclaimer: Please bear in mind the Song Info Aggregator is an experimental development, so any comments or feedback would be more than welcome.

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

As most of you already know, Michael Jackson passed away yesterday.  It’s a very sad time.

Since we don’t want to repeat what has already written everywhere else about arguably one of the greatest all time performers in music history, we decided to look around the web for radio stations that only play Michael Jackson.  We uploaded one to share with you, called MJTunes - Michael Jackson Radio, where you’ll find his music - songs, remixes, concerts… everything about him.  If there are any other MJ radios we should have, please let us know.  We’ll make that a priority.

Goodbye, King of Pop.

The Streema Team

We’re really - and we mean REALLY - excited to announce something that will be the beginning of a “before and after” moment in Streema’s history:  from now on, you will be able to see the name of the song that is currently playing.  This has been heavily requested by our community - and to be honest, to be able to finally show it to all of you it is unbelievably awesome!

So, how does this work?  It’s pretty simple to explain:  many radios stations offer this information in all sorts of different ways, sometimes via the stream, sometimes via their website.  What we do is figure out how to grab that information (which is many times not easily available) and then we’ll display it both on Streema.com’s player (check the screen shot above) and on our Facebook application’s popup player.  Here’s a quick sample of radio stations for which we will show the song information:

- Power Hitz, Hits from the U.S.
- NME Radio has THE best Alternative Rock in the U.K.
- Slow.fm plays Slow and Ambient music
- Roots Rock Reggae with classic reggae in Jamaica
- Deepinside - DJ Sessions if you want go Electronic ;)

In addition to most of 1.FM, 977, Sky.fm, 181.fm, AVRO, and M2 channels - check them out!

By the way, do bear in mind that we currently have this feature only for a reduced number of stations, but believe us that we’re working hard to eventually have this for as many stations as is humanly possible.  : )  In the meantime, you might want to see our directory ordered by availability of song information!

Is that all?  No Sir!  On our Facebook application, you’ll be able to update your Facebook status with the song information.  Also, keep an eye out because we might have something similar on our website Streema.com in the not-so-distant future.

Where else are we going with this?  We’re not sure yet, but we’d love to hear directly from you about this.  We hope you enjoy it as much as we are!

And more than ever… stay tuned!

The Streema Team

Santa brought us a present and we wanted to share it with you! We received notice this past week that Streema was chosen as one of the Top 10 innovations which have “contributed most to radio listening during the past year” in the annual list developed by About.com’s Radio Guide. What a great way to end the year!!

While we’re at it, we would also like to thank other blogs for mentioning us recently. Believe us when we say that we are really happy to hear how our site is being appreciated across the web. We’ve been working very hard to bring you a new radio listening experience and this encourages us to keep on rockin’. : )

Anyway, do stay tuned and see you in 2009!

The Streema Team

Hello Streema users!

We’re back with our Radio News update and, like it or not, again it’s all about the UK stations. The radio industry over there definitely has many movers and shakers!

First of all, our dear Virgin Radio has been acquired by an Indian media group, and it looks like it might undergo a name change. What do you think about this, should they keep the Virgin name or not? We ran a poll within the team and this was the unanimous result: we’d like it to stay the same!

Secondly, we wanted to let you know that Planet Rock “has been saved“! In our previous Radio News post we mentioned that is was near closing, but thankfully enough, it didn’t. : )

And last but not least, in case you’ve missed the Glastonbury Festival, you should listen to BBC Radio 1 and Q Radio during the next few days, as both stations are broadcasting the best of this year’s edition.

That’s all for now, hope you’ve enjoyed our latest bits of Radio News. Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

PS: Once again, thanks Cymon Humphries for providing us with the key industry information!