Tag: radio

Radio Listeners Around The World [Real-Time Map]

Posted on by Streema Team

Have you ever wondered how the World Map would looks like if we were able to see which radio station is listened in any place? Now you can do that!

Which radio stations would people walking along the Central Park be listening to? And which ones at Abbey Road 3, St. John’s Wood, London? And what about your very own neighbourhood?

Maybe you can remember some developments displaying the most listened artists in every US state according to Spotify, simultaneous listening worldwide or even a less known but very interesting work by Andrew Filer who mapped the reach of public radio stations in the United Stations, based on data from Wikipedia and the stations search from the Federal Communications Commission.

But what about the Radio Stations audience around the world? Well, this is what it looks like when the Listeners in Streema’s Platform (Streema.com & Simple Radio App for iOS):

World Online Radio Listeners

You can zoom in and out, and see a detail about what radio station is listening each user in real time:

New York World Online Radio Listeners

How we built it?

In order to develop this map, we’ve employed a few tools and services. In first place, we used Mapbox, whose Javascript Open Source Library allows you to create beautiful interactive maps and data visualizations and integrate them to your website in minutes. Mapbox also has a customizable map layer of streets, buildings and places around the World, known as Mapbox Streets, powered by open data from OpenStreetMap.

In addition, Mapbox also provides an easy way to add some really useful Leaflet plugins to add some awesome features and interactions. By instance, markers clustering is done using Leaflet.markercluster, and the zoom slider widget it’s here thanks to Leaflet.zoomslider.

Behind the scenes

So far, this is what you see. But how do we make everything work behind the scenes? Here at Streema, we have a set of services and applications, and between them we have Streema’s website and Simple Radio App for iOS.

Both applications keep track of several user actions and general metrics using an internal tracking tool which sends that information to a central service. By instance, we track every radio station played by every user. This central service also provides an interface to all our applications for listening to a subset of that actions and metrics. This way, we’ve been able to build a pretty simple application (using Tornado, a python framework and asynchronous networking library), that listens to every radio-played event and sends that information (using a websocket connection) to each visitor who’s seeing this map.

The simplicity of the application wouldn’t have been possible without the help from Maxmind whose geoip2 library gives us the power to localize each user; without the help from Heroku to get up and running quickly a production website; and NewRelic for keeping it constantly monitored and trace all the errors.

So, go and take a look at who’s near you and what radio station are they listening to. 😀

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

The 7 Ways to Connect with God using your Smartphone [Infographic]

Posted on by Streema Team

Hello Streema friends!

On this opportunity we would like to share some tips for our fellow Christian radio station listeners.

More tips and fun is coming for our wide spectrum of communities listening to online radio every day!

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

If you like it, share it with your friends!

SHARE ON FACEBOOKSHARE ON TWITTER

 

 

The 7 Ways to Connect with God using your Smartphone

SHARE ON FACEBOOKSHARE ON TWITTER

 

 

—————–

Text Version

The 7 ways to connect with God using your Smartphone

7 – The Holy Bible app

The app simply called “Bible” is a fantastic free and popular app by YouVersion. Offline reading & multi platform available. Check it out at www.bible.com

6 – Christian Music

Listen to your favorite Christian music with apps such as Spotify, Pandora, iTunes or even YouTube. You may like bands such as:

Hillsong United and Rosa de Saron

5 – Christian Radio on the go

Listen to live mass and prayers on your phone for free with these radio stations that have a wide variety of content

Rádio Evangelizar

Hope FM

K-Love

4 – Follow Pope Francis on Twitter

Read his updates, news and wise words from your phone. Follow @Pontifex And join his more than 10 million followers

3 – Social Media for a Good Cause

Connect with God by helping others. Use the social tools to engage, inspire or give real aid to real people in your community or an NGO: Food for the hungry and Caritas

2 – Take care of Friends and Family

With a simple WhatsApp message you can make someone happier and show them you care. Spread God’s love and be instantly connected

1 – Turn your phone off*

Connect with God by turning your phone off for a little while and try praying or meditating without any distractions. Now try talking to Him from your heart

He will listen and He may even answer!

*for a little while if you can!

—————–

We hope you enjoyed these tips. Thanks for sharing them!

Brought to you by Streema

Listen to your favorite Christian radio stations at Streema.com

Advertising & Streema

Posted on by Streema Team

If you are a frequent user of Streema.com, you may have seen brands promoted on our website. Today we want to talk about that: Advertising.

Streema’s business model is based on advertising, that means we develop and maintain our application, content, infrastructure and support with the sponsorship of third-party products and services.

That might not surprise you, after all, most of the web works that way, a few good examples are: YouTube, Google, Facebook and most of the newspapers. And that makes sense, since the Internet is a communication medium, and media connects people with people, people with things (brands and services), or just things with things. 🙂

Now, Advertising, as with every business, may or may not be well executed, you might have come across many websites where ads are nonsense or simply annoying. In many cases, they even confuse the users, promoting useless products or announcing that the user has won some kind of prize – when we all know that wasn’t the case. As we’ve mentioned in previous blog posts, at Streema we want to assure the best listening/watching experience, and the ads on our site are part of that, so we have been working to block ads, advertisers and Ad Networks that do not enhance that value. If you ever run into those types of ads on our site, please let us know so that we can continue improving your experience.

We work with AdSense, one of the biggest Ad Networks in the world, which has a really strict policy with advertisers. AdSense has been very reliable for us and in addition it also let us understand, with the help of Google Analytics, the behaviour of our users. AdSense’s job consists mainly in targeting relevant ads to the user, which is mostly based on: the geographical location of the visit, the content of the page, or what have been searched or browsed before coming to Streema (for certain users).

One important thing to mention is that if you are an advertiser that wants to advertise on Streema.com, whether on our desktop or mobile websites, you should sign up with AdWords or with one of the AdSense Certified Ad Networks. To learn more about how these ads work and how to advertise on Streema, please go to: https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/152693 .

That’s all for now, we hope this has helped you to better understand how our application works as well as how we pay our bills. 🙂

If you’d like to share an idea with us about this or want to inform us about a confusing or misleading ad, please send us an email to info at streema dot com. Thanks!

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

New Homepage for Streema.com

Posted on by Streema Team

This is just a short update to let you know we’ve updated our Homepage, you can check it out here.

As we’ve mentioned recently, we’re slowly restyling our entire desktop website, and this was an important milestone – hope you like it. 🙂 Also, the new Radio and TV players are coming soon, so stay tuned!

One more important thing: we would love to feature more images of radio and tv stations, so if you own or work for one, please contact us. Thanks!

The Streema Team

The 2012 U.S. Presidential Elections – Listen to the Debates on Radio

Posted on by Streema Team

At the Streema Blog we generally cover major events, so this time we want to bring the 2012 U.S. Presidential Debates.

The Presidential Debates in the U.S. are usually held at large halls (in a university, for example) with citizens in the audience and journalists as moderators. It’s important to remark that although the Debates are not constitutionally mandated, they are already part of the election process. The topics are usually the most relevant of the current agenda, and the Presidential Debates this year are particularly more interesting globally since one of the main topics is foreign policy. Before the elections there will be a total of four debates, three of them between presidential candidates and one of them between their respective vice presidential candidates.

So, tomorrow Tuesday 16, at 9 p.m. Eastern Time, the 3rd debate is happening and it’s between the US President Barack Obama (Democrat Party) and the former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney (Republican Party). To listen to it on radio, most of the Public Radios in the US will broadcast the event, but you can particularly try the following ones:

WNBF – AM 1290

WVTF – FM 89.7

Fox News Radio

In case you’ve missed the previous debates, during the first half of October we already had two of them, the first on Oct 3rd between the presidential candidates and the last on 11th between the Vice Presidents – current Vice President Joe Biden (Democrat) and Wisconsin U.S. Representative Paul Ryan (Republican).

So, tomorrow October 16th will be the third and the next (and last) one will be on October 22 (also 9:00 p.m. Eastern Time). Be sure to listen (or see) to them if you get the chance!

After that, the elections will happen on November 6 and we hope you follow them on radio too. 😀

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

Some thoughts on Radio

Posted on by Streema Team

Sometimes when we explain to people what we do, we hear a reaction such as: “Ahhh, broadcast radio… isn’t that industry going downhill, specially with all those services such as Pandora, Spotify…”. In this blog post we would like to give our point of view.

First, when we think about “radio”, we think about a song, talk, show, or any content that is delivered live to everyone. While some services offer music or content on demand, radio is essentially the same audio content at the same time to everybody.

Right now there is trend called “customization” that technology and the web have spread widely, but we think that even in this context a live stream that anyone can tune in to has very specific value. Actually, it’s a way to “connect” people and makes us feel in community. Think about a song that is released for the first time on a station or when a popular radio DJ ask a tough fun question to a caller on live radio – that is a very unique experience.

Second, as we’ve mentioned before, radio is not only about music, there are also live shows, sport events, and talk shows of every type that you can imagine and even more: anime, astrology, art, children, drama, gaming, language, military, transport… and the list goes on. There are more than 70 non music genres containing radio stations that represent more than 30% of our directory.

Now, let’s get back to music. Everybody would think that most people discover new music through sources such as YouTube, Spotify, or any similar. However, recent studies suggest that people still choose radio as their first source for music discovery.

And now, back to content. It’s true, a big part of the traditional radio industry is still doing the same thing that it was doing decades ago, but there is a lot changing too and there are many people experimenting with new things, like new sources to fund and reach audiences. For example, the case of radio show “99% Invisible“, they aimed to raise $ 42K at Kickstarter (a popular online crowdfunding platform) and this month they raised more than $170K!!! This may or may not be a trend, although it’s certainly not the only one, and while it’s also true that not every show can easily raise the money to make it happen, this is for sure a great success story!

To conclude, without a doubt radio has its threats and its weaknesses, but we believe it also has its strengths and its opportunities. We hope Streema can help with these last two, helping radio to reach places it has never reached before and connect with its listeners in ways it has never done before.

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

If you’re still interested on this topic, check this out: The Big Box Theory, or Why Radio Is and/or Isn’t Dead

The Olympic Games are coming… follow them on Radio at Streema!

Posted on by Streema Team

We’re about a month away from the next Olympic Games which will be held in London.  For those that didn’t know, London will become the first city to host the Olympic Games three times – the two previous being 1908 and 1948.

The 2012 Summer Olympic Games will start on July 27th and end on August 12th, where 205 nations will compete in 26 sports divided into 39 disciplines.  This will be followed by the 2012 Paralympic Games, from August 29th to September 9th, where 147 nations will take part in the competition.

The excitement generated by the Olympics is worldwide and it will be followed globally through TV, Radio, Newspapers… and of course, the Web. The media has traditionally played a significant role in this event, although one can say that this role has evolved a lot since the last time the Olympics were held in London!

Once again, the BBC will be the main broadcaster providing a special program from July 25th to August 13th, and in addition, many UK radio stations will follow the event, a few of which follow below:

We look forward to see an amazing show, where athletes value progress over victory, respect over rivalry, and motivation over fear. We also hope the best for your favorite countries, athletes and disciplines. 🙂

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

Streema Behind the Scenes, or better said, Behind the Streams. :)

Posted on by Streema Team

A few times people have asked us about Streema with questions such as: are you guys a radio? are you a streaming services provider? We’ll answer these questions and a few more, so fasten your seat belts cause we’re going Behind the Streams. 🙂

To start off, we like to say that Streema is a social networking site for radio listeners – a big part of our service is to connect listeners and radio stations through the Internet. There are many stations that stream online, ranging from the very big stations that are part of a big corporation to the very small ones run by one person as a hobby. In order to make it easier for listeners to find these great stations, we created Streema. So, we are not a radio station, rather we are like your car’s radio tuner, which can tune to all publicly available stations, but we do it for the web and with a social angle to it.

Additionally, radio stations, big and small, stream their content via third party providers that take care of all the technical stuff, offering a publicly available stream, while the stations themselves focus on the content: music, talk and sports mostly. We’re not streaming content providers, but we do allow the listener to tune in to those streams provided by these third party services.

To summarize, Streema is not a radio station nor do we host nor stream content provided by the radio stations. However, we do organize all this information and provide a platform where people can tune in, discover and share their favorite radio stations, and in the future we’d love to build a global platform for radio stations to help them understand, learn from, and grow their own audiences.

We hope we’ve addressed some of these questions and that you continue enjoying a great listening experience on Streema. 🙂

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

2012 Trends for Online Radio

Posted on by Streema Team

In the last few months there have been a couple of conferences and events in the US (SXSW, RAIN Summit and Digital Music Forum East, to name a few) where many media industry leaders have been presenting their research and recent developments. The numbers are really positive for radio listening, so we wanted to share some of them with you. Bear in mind all these stats are for the US market, but they do show a trend that we believe is happening around the world too.

To start off, the report The Infinite Dial 2012 from Arbitron, the media & marketing research firm, shares a bit of data around the number of radio listeners out there:

Weekly online radio audience reaches an estimated 57 million people; audience doubled every five years since 2001.

When we talk about behaviour, TargetSpot, the digital audio advertising network, presented the First Digital Audio Advertising Research, a report that contained some interesting pieces of information, such as:

– 80% of internet radio audience listens for 1-3 hours per day, 40% listening 1-2 hours per session.

– 61% of listeners don’t keep player minimized, 64% often check the player for song/artist info. – this was added by TargetSpot’s CEO at the RAIN Summit.

– 73% of Internet radio listeners change stations stations multiple times a day.

Finally, based on Jacobs Media’s TechSurvey8, the most popular applications in the US are:

Pandora is the most popular pure-play Internet option, with 45% of “streamies” listening, topping competitors like iHeartRadio (19%), Spotify (7%), TuneIn Radio (7%) and Slacker Radio (5%). Its users are split as to whether internet pure play is actually considered “radio”: 43% said yep, 49% said nope. Listeners to alternative, Contemporary Christian, country, CHR and Variety Hits are more likely to consider Pandora “radio.”

That’s all for now!  Hope you find this data optimistic and relevant – we certainly do think it’s good news for Streema. 🙂

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team