Our TV experience has improved and now supports Picture in Picture

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.

Enable PiP with 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

Saying Hello to Service Cloud

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

Welcome to the club

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

Radio has a new player… and soon will TV!

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: still going strong!

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

Enter: OKRs

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

Saying Hello to 2018 with new announcements

We kicked off yet another year at Streema with a goal in mind: keep expanding our reach by leveraging new platforms, maintaining high levels of quality and empowering radio stations.

At Streema, we’ve been quietly working away on many things during the first month of the year and wanted to share with you some of them:

Simple Radio for iOS now available in 17 languages

At Streema we’ve always had users from all over the world using our applications. We added 13 new languages to our iOS app, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Italian. Our Android app does not stand far behind, currently available in 14 languages.

Improved Search on Alexa skill

Our Customer Support team read and replied to user reviews on Simple Radio Amazon Skill page. With their input, we worked very hard to enhance our Alexa Skill search so it can be easier for our users to find and stream their favorite radio stations. We will keep improving Simple Radio skill as we firmly believe voice-activated platforms are the future of audio listening

More & Better Content at the Help Center and FAQ

We have updated our Help Center to reflect on the new platforms where you can use Simple Radio, such as smart speakers and cars. Take a look!

Called over 10 radio stations and counting…

We would love to hear some thoughts from radio stations and get to know more about their concerns when it comes to online streaming.

You can schedule a call with our team at info@streema.com

Stay tuned!
The Streema Team

10M Monthly Active Users on our Platform

Today we’re happy to share with you that Streema recently reached 10 Million Monthly Active Users! We never thought that ten million people would use our service in a single month, but here we are. 😄

It’s difficult to think how big a number 10 million is when referring to people, but given the time we live in and thanks to many products and services we rely on, it’s also great to share that it’s possible to make it happen with a small team like ours.

Streema’s user base has changed in many ways through the years. For a long time our product has been used by desktop users at Streema.com – however, today, of those 10 million, around 7 million are mobile between mobile web and our Simple Radio App in Android and iOS.

Simple Radio has been the main reason for that growth in the last few years. Our app has received positive reviews with an average of 4.4 stars in the Play Store and 4.5 in the App Store, making it one of the best rated music apps out there. To all our lovely users, THANK YOU!

Here we’ve highlighted some of the best reviews we’ve recently read out of the hundreds we receive every day:

Simple Radio Reviews - October 2016

Stay Tuned!

The Streema Team

Simple Radio featured on Google Play again!

Hi everyone!

At Streema we wanted to let you know that our mobile app Simple Radio is being featured right now on Google Play for countries such as the United States, Canada, Brazil, UK, France and many more.

Simple Radio - Google Play Featuring

This is not the first time the app is featured on Google Play and we’re really happy about that. Also, we want to use this opportunity to thank the folks at Google for their feedback and recognition. 😊

Stay Tuned,

The Streema Team

Simple Radio for Android Auto is here!

We’ve been quietly working away on many things during the first few months of the year and wanted to share with you one of our projects: Simple Radio for Android Auto. The connected car is part of a future that is quickly coming to the present, and at Streema we want to be a part of it.

We’re proud to announce that we were selected as launch partners at Google’s Android Auto event last week in São Paulo, Brazil, where Google announced that Android Auto was coming to the South American country in April. Local media picked it up and we can say we’re very excited to contribute to create a more connected (car) world.

Here are some screenshots of the Portuguese language version of Simple Radio for Android Auto:

Simple Radio - Android Auto - Menu

Simple Radio - Favorites Menu

Simple Radio - Android Auto

Thank you Google for selecting us as launch partners and thanks to our team for building such an amazing app! 🙂

Stay tuned for more developments coming up.

The Streema Team