This time of year is one of my favorite times of year.  I will admit that at times during the year the day-to-day activities seem to be front and center and fill most of the day.  Christmas time always brings me back to what is really important.  First of all this time of year refocuses my attention on our Savior Jesus Christ.  Secondly the Christmas break gives me time to spend all day with my family for a couple of weeks and enjoy their company while my boys are on break from school.

This time of year also is a great reflection time for me on the past year.  As I sit watching my boys enjoy their new gifts, I’d like to take the time to give many thank yous for the past year.  I used to work at a radio station while in college, and I fell in love with broadcasting.  I moved on from that job after five years of doing it, but never lost the passion to do it.  When the opportunity came to do Big Sioux Media, I couldn’t pass it up.  I’m humbled by all the support over the last 2.5 years that Big Sioux Media has existed.  When I started the website, I thought it would be a fun way to webcast a few games during the year to feed my passion to do broadcasting.  But in the last 2.5 years, the site has grown from doing 15-20 webcasts a year to over 100 per year!!  And this year has been our best year by far.  We’ve had over 80,000 hits to our main page, about 200,000 total page hits, over 500,000 viewer minutes of live and archived videos, and over 470,000 views on our YouTube videos.  I’m truly blown away by all the support.  I have so much to be thankful for, and I want to give proper thank yous.

I want to first of all thank my family.  They allow me to put in the hours to write the stories, webcast events, and put highlight videos together.  Without their patience with me, I wouldn’t be able to spend the time that I do.  I want to thank Connie for all of her work and time spent helping me write stories.  I wouldn’t have the content on the site that I do without her help.  I want to thank Lee for joining me this year and having a willingness to do webcasts.  Having him help do the webcasts allows us to cover even more events for both schools.  I want to thank all of our advertisers.  They have taken a chance on me and this website, and I can’t thank them enough.  Without their support, I wouldn’t have been able to improve the quality of the webcasts each year.  Please thank them as well.  They are a vital part of the success of Big Sioux Media.  And last, but not least, I want to thank each and every one of you for your support!  I’ve been blown away by all the comments on the street, emails, messages, and phone calls from all of you.  All of you visiting the website, Facebook pages, Twitter page, Newsletter signups, and then also watching the events are a huge blessing to me.  It’s because of you that this has grown beyond my dreams, and it’s because of you that I continue to change the dream and look at ways to expand Big Sioux Media even more.

I want to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas!!  And I want to say thank you for a wonderful year in 2014.  I look forward to 2015, and I’m excited to see where Big Sioux Media will go in the next year.

Merry Christmas!!
Matt