The Streema Blog

Our TV experience has a lot of room for improvement, and we love to take on this kind of challenge.

In August, we updated our TV player to match the one we are currently using for radio at Streema.com to provide a better and more cohesive experience.

Also, the logic behind our TV stream playback has been improved. Now, we have a better understanding of whether a TV stream is working or not and can choose in real-time which TV stream would result in a better experience for the user (as we do with radio).

Among other improvements, our new TV player allows Picture in Picture, which means you can enjoy your TV channel while browsing outside of Streema.

To enable Picture in Picture, just click on the second icon from the right.

A small screen will hover over the web content that you are watching, as long as you keep the original Streema tab open. You can also close the small screen and return to the original TV to keep watching the content at Streema.

We have big plans for TV, including bringing more TV channels to Streema in the near future. So, as we always say: stay tuned!

The Streema Team

We’ve come a long way using Desk.com for Salesforce.

Almost every email, message or tweet sent to us was read and solved by our attentive Customer Support Team. (If you ever wrote us, you’ll know what we mean). For every one of these replies, we used Desk.com.

It’s been a long time since we started using this platform, and it has satisfied most of our needs so far. However, we felt we needed a fresh start with a new tool in order to face more challenges and bring faster and better answer to our users.

Now, our time has come to move on to another tool by Salesforce: Service Cloud. We are excited about the new features aimed at leveraging our Customer Support team that Service Cloud provides.

At the same time, we are working on updating our Help Center, not only its content but also its interface. Soon, the Help Center will be migrated to Service Cloud and have a new look & feel.

We are also improving our documentation, and bringing together bugs and issues reported among different tools, so all the information is right at the fingertips of our Support Team.

Exciting times at Customer Support, and Streema!

Stay tuned!
The Streema Team

As we mentioned last year, at Streema we’ve been focusing a significant amount of time into collaborating and communicating better among teams.

Along with the implementation of OKRs, we realized that it was difficult to connect them with our daily work. We struggled in finding a balance between 

Also, it was difficult to consolidate all our daily work into one place, accessible by anyone.

So, we began our research on different tools and frameworks to tackle this problem. We dug into Agile & Lean methodologies, such as Scrum and Kanban. In the process, we found Clubhouse.io, a tool specially designed for these practices. It motivated us to rethink our work as small tasks that could be done in week-long iterations.

We started using Clubhouse.io three months ago and it has completely changed the way we communicate and collaborate.

To start with, we’ve become a more collaborative team. Everyone can check on the status of everything that we are currently working at and include their thoughts or suggestions. We spend less time on email writing and more time discussing ideas over tasks and milestones.

Work is more visible, hence more measurable and manageable. Dependencies that blocked us for hours or days are now clear and we can tackle them before starting to work on something.

Our team can now work more distributed than ever. No matter the time of day, everyone knows exactly what needs to be done to impact on the OKRs. We can work in different time zones without having to spend time catching up on meetings.

We believe we’ve started breaking new grounds in the cooperation and performance of our team, to build more and better experiences for our users.

Stay tuned!
The Streema Team

If you have been using Streema for quite some time, you may have noticed a few changes on the player interface recently.

After thorough testing, we are glad to announce that we switched to a new player in early June. It provides broader compatibility with different streams than the previous player – this means that more radio stations are available on Streema!

The new player endured serious testing on several browsers. By doing so, we found and fixed whichever issue or bug we encountered. Now we can proudly say that the new player works better across a wide variety of browsers, especially Internet Explorer :).

Still, we believe there’s a lot more we can do to keep improving your experience at Streema. And rest assured, a new player for TV will be coming soon too!

Stay tuned
The Streema Team

Android Auto was launched by Google in 2015. As of February 2019, it is available in more than 500 car models from 50 different brands.

It brings the most useful apps to a compatible car display, in a format that makes it easy for the user to keep their main focus on driving. Users can control things like navigation and maps, calls and text messages, and music.

Ever since we launched Simple Radio for Android Auto in 2015, we’ve seen a steady growth on our user metrics.

We are happy to see more and more users every month listening to their favorite stations on Simple Radio while in the car.

Along with the increasing adoption of Simple Radio on smart speakers, Android Auto takes us one step closer to our goal of bringing radio to any device and occasion.

Stay tuned!
The Streema Team

There are some things that we learned along the way, and one of them is that in order to do things fast, it is better to just focus on as few activities as possible. The problem is, with so many things to work on, we often find ourselves focusing on activities with very low value.

Lately we came to the conclusion that we needed to stop and decide which activities we were going to focus on for the next few months. We were battling too many fronts at once, and little work was actually done.

We realized that one of the reasons for our continuous Work in Progress was that there were no goals, hence we did not know if what we were doing had an impact on the overall strategy. Without goals, everything seemed important and urgent.

Enter: OKRs.

OKRs stands for Objectives and Key Results. Google started using them in 2007 and still does. Basically what you need to know about them is:

• Objectives are ambitious, and should feel somewhat uncomfortable.
• Key Results are measurable; they should be easy to grade with a number (1 to 10, 0% to 100%, etc).
• OKRs are public; everyone in the company should be able to see what everyone else is working on (and how they did in the past).

If you want to learn more, here’s the original video from Google.

So what does this mean?

• Each quarter we set up OKRs at the company level
• Then each team decides their OKRs to contribute to the company’s OKRs
• Every effort contributes to an OKR, something important
• After each quarter the KRs measures the completion of the Objective

We’re not going to say it was easy but it has been a great success. OKRs have helped us prioritize. When you take stand-alone tasks, everything seems important and urgent, but when you compare tasks with each other and the goals are clear, it is easier to prioritize tasks since we know which one might have a greater impact on the goals.

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team