The Streema Blog

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!

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 .

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

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

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

It’s been three months since we launched our Facebook application for Pages, and we are really happy with the results! To understand our joy, we’ll let you know of a few Pages on Facebook that have added our application.

To start off, a few very known radios, such as Air 1 in the US, Radio Deejay in Italy, and Radio 1 in Slovenia have added our application to their pages.

In addition, a lot of popular radios as well: RTI from Slovakia, RMX from Mexico, WACK 91.1 from Trinidad and Tobago, The Rock from Florida (USA), Radiodiva and Radio Bari, both from Italy. All of them added our application.

Also, a lot of electronic stations also have our app, so if you like Drum and Bass, check out Nu-Perception; for Trance, Planet Citizens; and for Chillout, Buzzoutroom.

Another popular group of Pages that have added our application are universities. To mention just two: in Israel, Kol-Hacampus; and in the US, WPUNJ’s Alumni Association from New Jersey.

Finally, DJs, Bands and other types of pages also have the Streema Radio Tuner for Pages.

We want to specially thank all these Page owners for letting us create a radio listening experience on their page. And, of course, we also want to thank the more than a hundred fans that support the application. : )

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

PS – Sincere apologies for not mentioning all the Pages that have added our application. If you’d like to appear on our next post about this topic, please let us know.

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

As mentioned in a previous post on the Streema blog, Virgin Radio was acquired a couple of months ago and was going to be rebranded. Well, it finally happened: Virgin Radio has now changed its name to Absolute Radio. This rebranding includes the three stations they have nowadays: Virgin Radio, Virgin Radio Classic Rock and Virgin Radio Xtreme – they are now called Absolute Radio, Absolute Classic Rock and Absolute Xtreme.

Meanwhile, you’ll find them in our directory as:

• Absolute Radio – Virgin
• Absolute Classic Rock – Virgin
• Absolute Xtreme – Virgin

We’ve been listening to Absolute Classic Rock and… what can we say? It’s not the same! The presenters speak in the same way, but the music is already changing. Well, we’re total old schoolers, but it’s true that maybe this will make it a better station in the future… we’re not sure and we’d love to hear your opinion!

Stay tuned for the new design that’s coming to town… ;)

The Streema Team