The Streema Blog

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

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