The Streema Blog

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

Today we are reeeeaaally happy to announce we’ve released the first version of the Streema Widget!!  This has been one of the most requested features, so we hope you really enjoy it!

The widget enables anybody to grab a simple piece of code from our site and bring radio into your blog, website or social profile. In order to play a radio, it calls up a pop-up player (very similar to the one used in our application for Facebook Pages), so that people can continue browsing your site while enjoying a great station chosen by you.

Check out how it works right here in this blog post for Radio Orbital (to grab the code for this station, go here). If you want to select another radio station, just go to our radio directory, go to a station’s profile, and once there, click on “Get this Radio Widget”.

Free Online Radio Stations

Radio Orbital

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Grab this widget | Other radios

developed by

Although we know this is a basic version, we want to let you know that we’d still love to launch a wider family of widgets, where you’ll be able to customize the color, dimension, and appearance.  Remember, the more feedback you give us about this, the better it will get. :)

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

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

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

We periodically receive many inquiries regarding browsers, the most common ones being “What’s the best browser?” and “What’s the best browser to run Streema on?”. However, recently the most popular inquiries have revolved around the following question: “Why doesn’t Streema work in Chrome?”.

The potential answers for the first question are quite personal. Within our team, we can say that the PC users prefer Firefox and the Mac users prefer Safari. : )

As for the second question, Streema should work fine on:

• Internet Explorer: The last two versions, 6 and 7.

• Mozilla Firefox: The last two versions as well, 2 and 3.

• Safari: The last two as well, versions 2 and 3.

If you don’t know which version you’re using, just go to your browser’s menu, click on the “Help” tab, and then “About [browser's name]“.

Last week, Google launched their new browser called Chrome. We’ve seen that, for the time being, it doesn’t support the Windows Media Player. In other words, although Streema looks great on it, our site won’t work with Chrome when you play most of the stations on our directory. If anything changes, we’ll be sure to let all you Chrome fans know!

Touching the same point, there is a similar problem if you use Opera with the last version, although it can be solved using MPlayer or VLC Media Player.

For more info, please visit our FAQs section, or contact us via the contact form or email us at info at streema dot com. Hope we’ve cleared most of your doubts. : )

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team