The Streema Blog

Tomorrow, March 17th, will be St. Patrick’s Day!  Honoring the most recognized patron saint of Ireland, we’ll turn this post green right now. :)

Although St. Patrick’s is an Irish celebration, over time it has become a world wide event since it is also celebrated in countries like Argentina, Canada, Israel, New Zealand, South Korea, the UK and the United States, among many others.

To fully enjoy this event, of course, we specially recommend listening to Irish music stations, for example:

• All Irish Radio
• Live Ireland 1
• RTÉ Radio 1

Additionally, check out these tribute stations for Irish bands U2 and The Cranberries:

• Radio U2
• Cranberries Radio

That’s all for now.  If you still don’t have plans for tomorrow, we suggest you head to the nearest Irish pub – everyone’s Irish on March 17th. :D

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

Two weeks ago we participated via web conferencing in the second general assembly for RadioDNS, an initiative we’ve written about before.  We’re happy to say this project will soon become a legally formed not-for-profit organization, which will enable it to provide the RadioDNS basis as well as promote the technology to device manufacturers and broadcasters.

RadioDNS is a very important project.  Among other things, it aims to create a standard that will let all of us access a complete content guide for any station, which means more broadcast-related information, more feedback from listeners… eventually providing a radio experience as it should be!  You can learn more in this video.

We want to specially thank Nick Piggott and James Cridland for their work on this great achievement. At Streema, we’re fully committed to give our support to this organization as well as to others who have a vision that is aligned with using technology innovation to improve the radio listening experience.

As the RadioDNS states on its website: “There’s a change happening to your radio. It’s getting more connected to the rest of the world”.  We certainly want to contribute to that change. :)

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

This coming Sunday is St. Valentine’s Day – and we are expecting a big celebration of love. :)

While to some people it may be yet another commercial day – and the truth is most of us probably don’t know who that saint was – we think it’s a great occasion to honor what the White Duke (David Bowie) called it:  the old fashioned word.

And you guessed it, here are the best Love stations and Romantic radios out there, so you can devote them to anyone you love. We specially recommend these three:

• Sky.fm Love Music
• Love Radio 97.5
• M2 Love – Only Love Songs

If you want to go beyond Love and celebrate Peace as well, we suggest these two “Flower Power” radio stations:

• Flower Power Oldies
• Flower Power Radio
  
• Radio WoodStock

Okay, that’s all for now.  Just make sure that on Sunday, whomever you’re with, wherever you are, and whatever you do, you’re celebrating LOVE!

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

PS: Thanks to Rochi for recommending the picture we included in this post!

This blog post is not about radio stations, media players, nor music – it’s concerning a more delicate topic since millions of lives were affected.

It’s been over two weeks since the earthquake hit Haiti, one of the poorest countries on the planet, and as we all know, the country has been devastated.

Even though many people have already given support, it’s also true that many haven’t.  For those who haven’t – and for those that want to help again – we thought we would show you some options for helping.  This is obviously not an exhaustive list, but it’s a good place to start!

Donations:

• American Red Cross: http://www.redcross.org/

• Clinton Bush Haiti Fund: http://www.clintonbushhaitifund.org/

• Doctors Without Borders: http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/

• Save The Children: http://www.savethechildren.org/

• The International Rescue Committee: http://www.theirc.org/

Screen the movie “The Road to Fondwa” at your school, church, business, etc. and raise funds: http://fondwa.org/screenings/plan-a-haiti-fundraiser-screening/

And last but not least, spread the word! Copy the list above and share it via email, Facebook or Twitter.

Newspapers, TV stations, radio stations and even bloggers may be talking about the Haiti situation less now than a few weeks ago, but there is still a lot of people that are in need – and it’s Never Too Late To Help!  :)

Stay tuned,

The Streema Team

PS: If you know additional ways to help, please do share them with us here.

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 .

Hello Streema Fans!

We wanted to let you know that yesterday morning we reached 5,000 “Fans” on our Facebook application!  Yes, FIVE THOUSAND. :) Looking back we also realized that approximately a year ago, we posted that we reached 500 fans. That’s a 10-fold increase! This deserves a high five!!!  (no pun intended)

Now that we’ve given ourselves a nice pat on the back, it’s time to get back to work and add another “0″ to the number. So, this is our challenge: 50,000 Fans by November 2010. That might not be easy, maybe almost impossible – but hey, what’s life without trying for the “almost impossible” things. At the end of the day it depends of all of us!

Once again, thanks for being part of Streema.

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

Hi everybody,

For those of you that tune in via our Facebook application, a few weeks ago you likely experienced severe loading problems.  The problem appeared to be on Facebook platform side, and unfortunately, we have to say that we didn’t receive all the assistance we needed to solve it as soon as possible.

But the good news is that we’ve took the opportunity to make huge changes in how our application interacts with the platform – in other words, all the stuff that you can’t necessarily see but that keep the application running!  These changes now make our application less susceptible to these platform issues, but one downside of this is that in order to upload this new version as soon as possible, we had to temporarily disable our “Recommendations” section and a few small features.  But be patient, we’ll be back with it as soon as possible. :)

With this new upload, we also took the opportunity to include other things we were working on previously, such as the new pop up player we announced a couple of months ago.  This popup was designed using the style of our Streema.com website, which means that it hides the Windows Media or the Real Audio players, but keeps the play/stop and volume buttons.  Bear in mind, though, that you’ll still need to have these two media players installed on your computer!  See our FAQs for alternative media players.

As you might imagine, this launch was not prepared with all the care that we would’ve like, but at least our application is now up and running again!  If you find any bugs, please feel free to report them.

Anyway, thank you again for your patience and understanding.

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

So, we just rolled out a new version of our player this week and wanted to make a quick announcement about it!

Before we let you in on the details, we wanted to say that rather than “seeing” the change, you’ll actually experience the difference.

Essentially, when tuning in to a radio on Streema…

• No matter which Operating System you have: Windows, OS X, Ubuntu (or any Linux related)…
• No matter which Browser you are using: Internet Explorer 7.0/8.0, Firefox 2 or above, Safari, Chrome, Opera…
• And no matter which players and plug-ins you’ve installed: Windows Media Player, Real Audio, Flash, etc…

… our new player will find the best player / plug-in combination for your computer.  And our new algorithm is much better than our previous one!

What does this mean for you?  Simply put, you’ll be able to tune in to a greater number of stations than before.  That makes us very happy.  :)

Anyway, hope you continue enjoying your favorite radio stations, and more than ever, your feedback with this new player will be welcomed.  Please, if you find anything not working properly, let us know!

For those Facebook users out there, this new player will be rolled out on our Facebook application (Streema Radio Tuner) over the next few weeks.

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

We just posted about radio-related news recently, but what happened last week was so important for the online radio industry that we wanted to share it with you.

So, the news is that SoundExchange, the digital music fee collection agency owned by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), and the “pureplay” webcasters announced that they reached royalty agreement until 2015.  After a few long years of negotiations, it finally happened!  Basically, this new deal involves a discount on the rates for large webcasters, and offers smaller webcasters percentage-based payment options.  By the way, by “pureplay” we mean webcasters such as Digitally Imported and RadioIO, although companies such as Pandora Media, Inc. were also involved.

We’re bringing you this piece of news because this represents a very positive change in the industry moving forward, enabling small webcasters to stay in business and continue bringing you, the radio listener, the best music out there. And that’s a great reason to celebrate.  : )

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team