The Streema Blog

We’re about a month away from the next Olympic Games which will be held in London.  For those that didn’t know, London will become the first city to host the Olympic Games three times – the two previous being 1908 and 1948.

The 2012 Summer Olympic Games will start on July 27th and end on August 12th, where 205 nations will compete in 26 sports divided into 39 disciplines.  This will be followed by the 2012 Paralympic Games, from August 29th to September 9th, where 147 nations will take part in the competition.

The excitement generated by the Olympics is worldwide and it will be followed globally through TV, Radio, Newspapers… and of course, the Web. The media has traditionally played a significant role in this event, although one can say that this role has evolved a lot since the last time the Olympics were held in London!

Once again, the BBC will be the main broadcaster providing a special program from July 25th to August 13th, and in addition, many UK radio stations will follow the event, a few of which follow below:

• BBC London
• LBC Radio
• talkSPORT

We look forward to see an amazing show, where athletes value progress over victory, respect over rivalry, and motivation over fear. We also hope the best for your favorite countries, athletes and disciplines. :)

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

In the last few months there have been a couple of conferences and events in the US (SXSW, RAIN Summit and Digital Music Forum East, to name a few) where many media industry leaders have been presenting their research and recent developments. The numbers are really positive for radio listening, so we wanted to share some of them with you. Bear in mind all these stats are for the US market, but they do show a trend that we believe is happening around the world too.

To start off, the report The Infinite Dial 2012 from Arbitron, the media & marketing research firm, shares a bit of data around the number of radio listeners out there:

Weekly online radio audience reaches an estimated 57 million people; audience doubled every five years since 2001.

When we talk about behaviour, TargetSpot, the digital audio advertising network, presented the First Digital Audio Advertising Research, a report that contained some interesting pieces of information, such as:

- 80% of internet radio audience listens for 1-3 hours per day, 40% listening 1-2 hours per session.

- 61% of listeners don’t keep player minimized, 64% often check the player for song/artist info. - this was added by TargetSpot’s CEO at the RAIN Summit.

- 73% of Internet radio listeners change stations stations multiple times a day.

Finally, based on Jacobs Media’s TechSurvey8, the most popular applications in the US are:

Pandora is the most popular pure-play Internet option, with 45% of “streamies” listening, topping competitors like iHeartRadio (19%), Spotify (7%), TuneIn Radio (7%) and Slacker Radio (5%). Its users are split as to whether internet pure play is actually considered “radio”: 43% said yep, 49% said nope. Listeners to alternative, Contemporary Christian, country, CHR and Variety Hits are more likely to consider Pandora “radio.”

That’s all for now!  Hope you find this data optimistic and relevant – we certainly do think it’s good news for Streema. :)

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

Ever since we started Streema, we knew we would need to develop a very large database with a lot of information about radio stations – and today we want to tell you a little bit more about how we build it. Essentially, we get our information from three main sources: our Community, an Automatic Aggregation System, and Outsourced Services.

Community

These are our users who every day request a radio station, report a wrong description or give us any feedback, for example. These users are, in many cases, the best source of quality information, because for example, there’s no one better than a radio owner to inform us which is the correct stream or the correct description of their radio station. They also take the time to let us know about a new genre, a radio acquisition or any missing information. We are really thankful to all of our users but specially want to thank Steve who has reported and helped us improve the information for hundreds of radio stations from Canada and the USA.

Automatic Aggregation System

Over the past decade, the web has evolved in a lot of ways, and one of the biggest ways is how information is delivered. At the beginning one of the most popular formats was RSS but recently Twitter and Facebook have replaced it in many ways. We’re working hard to integrate Twitter, Facebook, and other sources of information so that our users can have access to all of that via our radio profiles.

Outsourced Services

Not everything is so easy and fun, because sometimes neither our users nor any automatic aggregation can find the information we need for thousands of radio stations, so in those cases, we have to use other services and get help from other people. To do that, we use services such as Mechanical Turk and oDesk, where people willing to help us can find the information we need quickly, such as slogans, descriptions, telephone numbers, twitter accounts, or anything else we request. We want to thank all the people who have worked with us via these services, specially Teresa and others who are doing a great job at, for example, finding radio show information.

At Streema, we’re working hard today to build the most complete and comprehensive online radio platform, which mostly includes radio stations for now, but in the future will also have radio shows, hosts and more. We hope you help us to make it better and enjoy the journey too. :D

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

Here’s a neat little feature we recently released and wanted to let you know about: Radio Reviews.  Now you can rate and review any station on our site!

We uploaded this feature a few days ago and we’ve already noticed some interesting activity. Check out these examples:

• Caraibes FM - News and Talk from Haiti
• Radio Boas Novas AM - Brazilian and Gospel from Brazil
• KC Tunes - Classic Rock from the United States

That’s all for now – we look forward to seeing your radio ratings and reviews!

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

PS: Soon soon very soooooon we’ll bring the present we promise!

At Streema, we’re a community that celebrates a spectacular medium called radio.

We’re not the only ones, though, since thousands of musicians and artists, ranging from rock to pop, metal to folk and even jazz have also celebrated radio.  There is no doubt this medium has influenced music, people, culture… and pretty much our entire society in the past decades.

So, today, we bring you some of the most popular songs in history that bands such as Queen, Autograph and Rush have dedicated to radio.  Hope you enjoy them!

Radio Ga Ga – Queen

Radio Waves – Roger Waters

Radio – Robbie Williams

Video Killed the Radio Star – Buggles

Turn Up The Radio – Autograph

Radio – The Corrs

The Spirit Of Radio – Rush

Which one is your favorite?  Are we missing any great songs?  If so, please let us know – we’d love to add them too!

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

Streema is all about radio. Stations are the main medium where people listen to music, talk or sport shows… without these, Streema wouldn’t have a reason to exist.

So, daily, we receive large amounts of requests through our Radio Request Form for stations that we don’t yet have in our directory. The work required to add each one is very time consuming and hard to scale, so every once in a while we improve the process we use internally to do this work.  Today is a big step forward in that direction.

Starting now, the Radio Request Form will require more station-related data in comparison to how it was before.  Even though this might mean a little more work for you – i.e. the person that requests the station – this way we all help create a more accurate, reliable and enjoyable Streema experience. We encourage you to continue requesting all the stations you don’t find in our Radio Directory.  Thanks!

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

PS: Yes, we know we many of you have requested stations that haven’t been added yet; please, be patient, we’ll upload them all for sure.

Every once in a while, we have a “Before and After” moment in Streema’s development – and today, we’ve got one of those. From now on, when playing any station on the Streema.com website, our website’s player will open in a separate window, as it currently does on our popular Facebook application.  We understand that many of you are probably thinking “So what’s the big deal?”, but this is a change that will help us build a better Streema and we’ll explain how in the paragraphs below.

One of the features that we’ve traditionally been very proud of was our embedded player, since it allowed users to navigate Streema without the stream getting cut off.  But this meant that there were tradeoffs to be made in terms of loading time, usability, search engine crawleability, availability of station information, etc.  At this point, it made sense for us to not make those tradeoffs anymore, and while it’s difficult to explain all the pros and cons in a single blog post, here’s a quick summary of how users will benefit:

• A site that is more in line with what’s usually experienced on the web – for example, players usually open in a different window on most media sites and the URL of the page you are visiting usually appears on the browser’s address bar!

• Station stream won’t stop if you happen to click on an ad on our website – this was important because many ad networks will not open up in a separate window.

• Much faster site, in particular for first time users.  Many people will be reeeeally happy about this.

• Better and more complete radio station information at your finger tips, specifically located in our website’s player, and allowing for more interactivity in the future – at least that’s what the plan is!  :)

We know there will be some of you that will miss our embedded player, but we do hope you understand this big change and maybe eventually you will come to enjoy it.  We worked hard in the past with our embedded player (you can read more here and here), but we think it’s time to take Streema to another level, and we believe this will help us build the foundation to get there.

Do note that if anything is not working as you expected, please let us know, as your feedback is really important for us.

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

We’re a week away from the 2010 FIFA World Cup, the most popular sports event across the globe.  Starting June 11th, and lasting one month, 32 nations will play in 9 cities around the country of South Africa.  In it’s 19th edition, it will be the first one held in an African nation.

This is an exciting time!  For a whole month,  the entire globe will be talking about this tournament.  It will be present in the news and in talk shows everywhere, and for many people, the World Cup will be present in every conversation!

So, if you’re not one of the lucky few who will get to see it in person, here you can find some of the best soccer stations to listen to the games:

BBC Radio 5 Live (United Kingdom)

talkSport (United Kindom)

Radio Marca (Spain)

RAI Sport (Italy)

RTL L’Equipe (France)

Bayern 3 (Germany)

Radio Bandeirantes (Brazil)

Ok, that’s it – now, nobody has an excuse for not knowing that there are 11 official languages in South Africa or not being able to name the Uruguayan Head Coach!

Good luck to everyone and their team!

Stay tuned,

The Streema Team

Today there are two big pieces of news that happened in the past month and that we wanted to share. Unfortunately, they are both bad news, but part of a natural process in a changing industry like radio; we’re hoping that in the longer term, the consequences will be better for the industry as a whole.

The first one, which brought a great deal of attention, was the announcement that the BBC will stop broadcasting BBC 6 Music and BBC Asian Network at the end of 2011. The decision prompted a backlash from listeners, trade unions and the music industry, and even the presenters and DJs of the BBC 6 Music station.  If you’re interested, check out the complete guide to support it.

The second piece of news actually appeared on the other side of the Atlantic and covers online media. CBS Radio decided to shut down its streams to non U.S. listeners, which affects all the content accessed via the AOL, Yahoo! and CBS streaming networks – that represents A LOT of radio stations in our radio directory.

It’s really interesting to see how two similar decisions elicited such different responses.  In one case, the CBS Radio decision affected a very large group of global listeners, but no one revolted.  In the other case, it seemed that it hit a smaller yet close-knit community of listeners, employees, and other radio-related folks – and the resulting effect is that they joined forces and have been rallying to stop the shutdown.  This situation reminds of the classic Margaret Mead quote…

“Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Anyway, we’ll keep you posted on all of this as it evolves.  Stay tuned for the next episode of Radio News!

The Streema Team

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