First, let’s take a step back – one of our priorities was to change our site without confusing our users. There are many things we needed to improve, so we’ve been working hard on the “facets of the honeycomb” – mostly in the following attributes: useful, usable, findable, accesible, and credible. (thanks Nico!)

To start off, we silently rolled out a new layout for our radio profiles. This is what you’ll find now on our site:

Also, as a sneak peak, here’s a mockup of what we think our homepage could look like:

… and for those site builders and web enthusiasts out there, here are two possible wireframes for our new radio player page:

Bear in mind that this is a work in progress and that we may implement something completely different, but we still wanted to share this with you. :)

Hope you like what you’ve seen above and hope you will soon enjoy a new and improved Streema. Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

To start off, when you visit http://streema.com from an iPhone, iPod, iPad or Android device’s browser, you’ll find we’ve developed a mobile-friendly homepage with some featured radios that our users can start listening to – sweet and simple.

Also, since not all streams are supported by mobile web browsers, we only show the stations that can actually play in each of those platforms. We know that having only a fraction of the stations available is less than ideal, but the truth is that we want to make your life easier and give you the best experience possible.

Finally, as we’ve mentioned in our previous post, we’ve improved our customer support, and that also includes our Mobile Support. It’s very important for us to hear your opinions, so please, don’t hesitate in giving us your feedback. Do bear in mind that this is a work in progress and that it will be evolving over time. :)

For those registered users out there, we’ll soon be working on letting you log in to your account with your mobile phone so you can find and edit your favorites. Additionally, in the not-so-distant future, we’ll start showing the “now playing” information, offer the possibility to comment on a station’s Wall, as well as add compatibility to more devices and much more for our mobile users, so stay tuned!

The Streema Team

To start off, for News in the United States, we recommend tuning in to WABC-TV from New York, NY (ABC Network).

In case you want to watch Sports, check out Wilamette Valley Television from Salem, OR (America One Network).

And if you’re in more of an Entertainment mood, check out CBC Montreal from Canada (CBC Network).

Bear in mind that for now, we only have TV Stations for the United States, Canada and Mexico. We’re also only publishing the main channels for each TV Station, but we’ll be adding the rest in the future.

Hope you enjoy those stations and discover more of the world of Sound and Vision:

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

The Help Center is at its core a selection of “frequently asked questions” divided in sections plus some other useful information. And if you don’t find what you’re looking for, you can still contact us directly! Additionally, we’re trying out a few different features like offering instant support (i.e. chat window) and allowing users to publish public questions. Let us know what you think of these!

Bonus: for mobile browser users, we’ve prepared a custom mobile FAQ where you should find most of your answers. ;)

In case you want to know a little bit more about the technical implementation, we used Desk to develop the Help Center and Olark for the instant support.

Anyway, that’s all for now. We really hope you can now find better answers to your questions while having an improved experience at Streema.

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

From the technical point of view, it’s true they transmit in different parts of the radio frequency spectrum (USA example), but on the human side, they share actors, producers and directors, and many of the roles played on TV are also played on radio. TV is about entertainment, news, sports, education, politics, culture… it’s not a surprise that radio has those same genres as well. And at the end of the day, TV is about connecting with people and radio is about connecting people. When we look at what we want to do at Streema, it’s connecting people.

We already have radio, so why not bring TV to Streema? Well, we thought it was a great idea and we did it! Starting January 1st, 2013, you’ll be able to watch TV on Streema. We’ll start with a few TV Stations from North America, but over the next few months we’ll be adding more from the rest of the world. Hope you enjoy this end-of-the year announcement! We know we will. :)

And given that that 2012 is coming to a close… Happy New Year and see you in 2013!

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

PS: Here one of the songs we like more of TV on the Radio:

But running tests takes time. A few months ago our unit tests were taking over 12 minutes to run. Each time someone wanted to run the tests, the situation was pretty much like this:

As you might recall, we use Python/Django. And our problem was the use of fixtures in our unit/functional tests. As @carljm said on his “Testing and Django” talk for PyCon 2012, they are slow to load, hard to maintain and increase test interdependence. We had huge fixtures, 1mb fixtures, which loaded thousands of models and they were used on dozens of tests!  With a little bit of patience we were able to remove them all and replace them by using factory boy.

The result:  we reduced the test run time from over 12 minutes to under a minute.  Yes, a single minute.  =)

Stay tuned for more news and insight on the technical details of Streema. We might have an interesting thing or two to share!

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

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. :D

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

Ever since Streema’s beginnings, we’ve wanted our site to be a social network for radio listeners. When Facebook launched its Application Platform back in mid-2007 we looked at that as a natural step in that direction, so we started developing an application in late 2007. We did some really cool stuff with that app, even growing to become one of the biggest radio apps out there and winning a “hockey stick award“. As we grew, Facebook Page owners started asking for a way to add stations to their pages, so we went ahead and built an application for Pages.

Unfortunately, Facebook started deprecating certain features for Pages, so we couldn’t continue developing that particular application and we closed it in 2010. Then last year, we realized that we couldn’t dedicate resources to our original Facebook app for listeners and we stopped developing it as well.

Then, the story took an interesting turn, bringing us to today. Our community of users continued growing and Facebook continued evolving their strategy to create a more social web, launching Open Graph in the past year. So we thought this was a great opportunity to bring Facebook back into our life by adding the “Login with Facebook” button – as a result, now you can use your Facebook account to login to Streema while sharing your Streema activity. We think that’s the way to go for now and, although we know there are many things we could do, we believe this is the start of a deeper integration with Facebook.

In a few words, yesterday we had an application (or, rather, two applications) on Facebook; today we have the “Login with Facebook”; and tomorrow, the truth is we don’t exactly know, but we have a few ideas. What’s certain is that we’ll keep working with Facebook and other applications / social networks to create the best social radio experience on the web.

Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

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 truth is… we’ve been quite busy here! But we do hate to say that, because busy is not a good explanation nor is the answer we think you should receive – this beautiful article tells why we think that: The ‘Busy’ Trap.

Now, it’s also true that if we don’t want this to happen again, we better start working on our next blog post. :) Stay tuned!

The Streema Team

PS: BTW, Dilbert always explains it better (click on the image to see it in a larger size).