Tag: streams

Improving Radio Player Performance at Streema

Posted on by Streema Team

Following the improvements we mentioned in our previous blog post, now we’re back with more news about our player – after all, Streema is about playing radio and TV. 🙂

Before we start, something important to mention is that, as we’ve explained before, Streema does not provide the streaming service, but rather it provides the platform for tuning in to stations. However, in many cases we’re not able to play a radio or TV station because there’s a broken stream or because we don’t find compatible players. Here are some figures to explain that better:

For our Radio Desktop users*, last month (August 2013) 70.3% of them were able to play a radio station, while that number was only 57.6% a year ago (August 2012).

*These figures do not include external players – if they did,
the percentage of successful tune ins would be much higher.

 

To do so, a big part of the work was fixing and updating thousands of streams. Additionally, we have also improved how the plugins work as well as the number of plugins supported – for example, last year 13.4% of our users couldn’t play a station because a of plugin compatibility issue, today that number is only 6.1%.

As you might know, a plugin is a software that allows, in our case, to play a station in your browser, so part of our job is to find plugins that will make the audio and video work on your desktop, tablet, or smartphone.

All this has been the result of both testing and measuring better as well as understanding the behavior of our users. Thanks for listening and watching!

Hopefully in the not so distant future we’ll have a chance to share some data regarding mobile as well as TV.

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

User Experience Improvements: Search, Radio Streams and Radios Without Stream

Posted on by Streema Team

Today we want to send out a quick update about three user experience improvements we’ve released:

Search

We’ve improved our radio directory search using Indextank, an outsourced search service for web applications. This should provide faster and better results when you search by radio, city, country, etc. on Streema. We’ll soon be releasing other features, such as: Faceting and Autocomplete. Consider this is a recent implementation and might need some fixes, it’ll keep getting better. 🙂

Radio Streams

As part of the process we started a couple months – which we mentioned in a previous post – the streams of thousands of radio stations in our directory have been fixed. This should definitely result in a better user experience, because there’s nothing worse than trying to tune in a radio and not being able to listen to it. We want to continue working on this area, so please, help us by letting us know when a station doesn’t work.

Radios without Stream

You’ll find our directory has many stations without streams, this is either because the station doesn’t stream online, it doesn’t work, or we don’t have it stored in our database. For those stations, we thought it would be great to provide our users with similar options to listen, so in case you click on the “play button” of any of those radios, a message offering other streaming stations will appear. We want to specially thank Emiliano Castaño who has given his good advice on building this part of the user interface.
Disclaimer: this is a feature we are currently testing, so you’ll probably won’t see it every time you visit Streema.

That’s all for now, we hope you enjoy these improvements. 🙂

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team