The Streema Blog

Hi everybody, here we are again with our current edition of radio-related news!

RadioDNS is presented globally

The first piece of news is that RadioDNS, the collaborative project that enables the convergence of radio broadcasting and IP-delivered services, has been presented worldwide with very positive feedback.

In non-techie words, the project aims to use the information that is already broadcasted and, by using standard technology, connect to the Internet to allow users to discover more about what they are listening to. This would enable you to have an electronic program guide and even let you ‘tag’ bits of the radio you find interesting such as your favorite song or something the presenter said.

Over here at Streema, we want to show our support for such an ambitious project!

K-Rock flipping to a pop format at 92.3Now FM

The second piece of news (which is not so new!) is that K-Rock, famously known because of Howard Stern, changed to 92.3NOW FM last March.  In a move that might not be the happiest one for most of us, it flipped from a Rock format to a Top 40 – for more info go to the following Rolling Stone article.

BBC Radio 2 and Radio 4 streaming worldwide

And last but not least, a very good one is that the BBC is now broadcasting Radio 2 (Entertainment, Comedy, Pop, Folk, more…) and Radio 4 (Arts, News, Comedy) to the whole world.  These two channels were previously streamed only in the UK, and they will now be in Windows Media Audio format, instead of Real Audio. We hope this makes it possible for more people to listen to these great BBC channels!

Anyway, that’s all for now. We hope you continue enjoying Streema!

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, check out what’s cooking below!

Yes, we’ll soon be changing the design of our Facebook application’s popup player.  If you are also one of our website users, you’ll notice that the new player has the same style as the one on the Streema website.

Anyway, just wanted to give you a sneak preview.  More new cool stuff is coming soon to our Facebook application, so stay tuned!

The Streema Team

Today, April 22nd, 2009, is a special date:  “The Streema Blog” has just turned a year old!   Happy Birthday!

So… during the last 12 months we’ve mostly posted news about Streema.com and our two Facebook applications , but we’ve also written about radios, music and other news we thought was important for our community.

When we created this blog one year ago, we did it to have another channel to enhance the communication with our users, mainly because we wanted to receive feedback about our work.

Looking back, we’re glad to say that it hasn’t been a bad decision after the scores of comments and all the emails we’ve received because of it. To be honest, we haven’t been strong writers (24 posts in total), but hey, between a bunch of engineers and a math guy, who could expect more!?  :P

Anyway, thank you for being with us until now.  We expect 2009, and our blog’s 2nd year, to be a great one!
Stay tuned!

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

Hi everybody, we’re back with some good news!

Lets start with some history. Back in the old ages of 2008, Facebook announced that it was going to launch a profile redesign. At Streema, we researched all the implications and developed a bunch of new stuff we thought our users would like: the Profile Tab was one of them.

To our pleasant surprise, the Profile Tab has been very popular amongst our users, so we thought it would be great to continue improving it! In the same way we did with the old Profile Box, your most listened radios will now appear. In addition, given that many radio fans and owners wanted to make one station stand out on their profile, you will now be able to “Feature” it. To do so, just go to our application, then to the Profile section, and follow the steps – you’ll be featuring a radio on your profile in less than a minute! Check out the screen shot below.

Also, remember that one of the best ways to share that radio is also to recommend it to all your friends. ;)

Okay, enough for now! If you haven’t added the Profile Tab yet, just go to your profile, click on the More Tabs menu which is displayed as a “+” (plus sign) and then select “Streema Radio Tuner”. :)

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

If you haven’t visited our radio directory recently, we recommend you do that right now! :)

Aside from finding a growing directory of thousands of radio stations, you’ll see that we now order radio stations by popularity, as measured by our community’s activity. It’ll be easier than ever to find the best stations out there! Check out the screen shot below.

If you look closely, you’ll also notice that on the right side of the page there’s a showcase of the top station for a select number of genres. This is so that you can quickly explore radios that Streema users have been listening to a whole lot recently. :)

Anyway, we hope you enjoy this new radio discovery tool – and we look forward to bringing you a more social and better community experience at Streema in the coming months.

So, one more time, stay tuned!

The Streema Team

Today we’re celebrating that we’ve reached 500 “Fans” on our Facebook application – this deserves a high five!!!

Among our hundreds fans, we have people mainly from these countries: Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Colombia, Croatia, Greece, Italy, Slovakia, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay, and Venezuela; and we also have fans from: Albania, Andorra, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, China, Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany, Grenada, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Ireland, Jordan, Malaysia, Mexico, Monaco, Nepal, New Zealand, Norway, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, and the Virgin Islands. This means we have fans from 50 countries… only 142 more to go! :P

As always, and now more than ever, we encourage you to continue sharing, recommending and enjoying Streema!

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

As we mentioned over two weeks ago, we’ve been working really hard to develop a new design for Streema.com. Today we can say it is finally with us – yeeeaaahhh!

So… go to Streema.com and you’ll see that we’ve changed the WHOLE front end of our site. This has involved the design and architecture of images and objects, any message, alert or notification displayed, the color palette and even the Streema Logo! We hope this will improve and enhance your experience on our site.

Besides the “design”, the main differences you’ll experience as a user are: a new Home page you get when not logged in; and the development of a Player (check the mockup below) which lets us hide the ugly Windows Media or the Real Audio players – although you’ll still need to have them installed on your computer in order to play all the stations in our Radio Directory, exactly as it works nowadays. There are other cool new things on our site, but we’ll leave you to discover them on your own. : )

Well, we’re really excited about this big change and we hope we’ve chosen the right path. We still think there’s room for improvement, so we specially request you to tell us what you like and don’t like. Thanks and enjoy the new Streema.com !!

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

As we’ve mentioned before, we’ve been working really hard to develop a new design for Streema.com – and today we can say we are very close launching it or, in other words, bringing it to town! : )

The big reason for this redesign is that we needed to give our already very useful site a “cool” look while keeping it as user friendly as possible. We hope this will improve and enhance your experience at our site.

As an avant premiere for our blog readers, below you can see how the Homepage will look as soon as you get to Streema.com for the first time, before logging in:

We are really excited about this big change and we hope the next post about Streema.com will be about launching this cool new design!

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team