Third Anniversary for AirMaria!!

Ave Maria!

Today is AirMaria’s third anniversary of our official start on March 25^th, 2007. Thanks be to God. And thank you, our viewers and benefactors, for your continued spiritual and financial support. It is a great day on which to have our anniversary because it is the Annunciation when St. Gabriel told Mary that she is to be the Mother of God and by her acceptance the Word became Incarnate for the salvation of the world. The goal of AirMaria is also to announce this good news to the world, teaching them about Jesus by teaching about His blessed mother.

This year it is also special in that we are carrying a live video stream from Rome for the first time. It will cover the Vatican Forum sponsored by Inside the Vatican magazine which will be on the timeliness of proclaiming the Fifth Marian Dogma of Mary as Coredemtprix, Mediatrix and Advocate. This is very exciting since it is the most prominent discussion on the issue ever with Bishops and Cardinals in attendance. It will be broadcasted by H2O News.

It has been quite a while since we made a general update. In that time most of 2009 and a good part of 2010 has passed by. In fact, I wanted to make this a New Year’s update. I also wanted to keep my New Year’s resolution to stop procrastinating, but as you can see I definitely missed the boat. Well, there is always next year.

Part of the problem is 2010 has already been a busy year for us with the March for Life in January which we broadcast live from the National Mall as we did the previous year and then more recently we were busy getting the new AirMaria offices ready and then had our trip to Chicago for the Sports Faith International Hall of Fame Induction which was held on February 21^st in the Chicago Bear’s Headquarters in Halas Hall.

Facebook &Twitter

In order to give people the ability to follow us on the popular social sites Twitter and Facebook we have added automatic updates to them directly from AirMaria.com. Hopefully this will enable people to spread the word about our videos.

2009

So, 2009 has come and gone and it was quite a year for us here at AirMaria. First let us especially thank those who have donated in our three latest fund drives all of which occurred in the last three months of 2009. All of the goals were fully achieved including those of our most recent License to Beg video.

The first fund-raising effort was occasioned when our Mac desktop died. The effort was carried out in private and was fulfilled by one generous benefactor.

The second was when our HP Laptop died. Many donations came in from the begging post that we put on AirMaria. We were able to get a top of the line Dell PC that will enable us to do live broadcasts more easily as we proved at the 2010 March for life in DC.

And the third was our most recent drive in December to get additional equipment including an HD Video Camera and the storage capacity to capture and store videos on digital disks since tapes are becoming obsolete. We were able to get a very good HD camera that we have already used extensively during the 2010 March for Life in DC and elsewhere. See the video here.

Miscellanea #50 – Up Capital Hill ( 04min) >>> Play

We also entered the world of Podcasting in 2009 by adding audio to our site with mp3 buttons below each post and below our video player on our viewing page. These in turn are uploaded to our I-tunes page as soon as they are posted on AirMaria.

New Content

MaryVictrix – Fr. Angelo’s articles from his blog Maryvictrix are also now appearing in AirMaria and this has been very popular with many comments added to the viewer discussion.

Homilies – We also started adding homilies from our friary at Mt St Francis in the town of Maine, NY and from a local parish St Mary’s in Baltic, CT by Fr. Joseph Tito. We plan on continuing both of these on each Sunday.

Glories of Mary – We started another text series The Glories of Mary which are excerpts from St. Alphonse Liguori’s timeless book by that title. He is a Doctor of the Church and great promoter of devotion to Mary.

Catekids – The Seifker family has started a kid’s catechism series that has received many positive comments. They have been a great addition to AirMaria and we are looking forward to more.

We are also getting more content form our other English speaking friaries around the world. This includes Bloomington Indiana, Mt. St. Francis in NY state, La Crosse, WI and even Australia and England.

Milestones

We have hit many mile stones during the year. On AirMaria itself we have over 2000 videos posted as well as another 1000 non video posts. We have over 400,000 visitors with a million page views and over 600 new visitors a day. We hope to improve this soon with better advertising and more content.

We continue to upload to video share sites like YouTube and Gloria.tv and Catholic Online. All of these sites have over a thousand of our videos making us one the biggest Catholic producers for these sites and for some sites the biggest producer outright. We even upload our videos to Tangle.com a Protestant site. This includes Dr. Mark Miravalle’s MaryCast series that is promoting the Coredemption!! The goal is to bring the Immaculate to as many souls as possible by every legitimate means.

Our Youtube site has over 500,000 views on the well over 1000 videos which we have uploaded and we have over 1400 subscribers. The other sites have similar numbers.

New Server

We changed servers again this year in order to add more features and improve service. Our videos are now downloading as fast as modems will allow and usually faster than sites like YouTube.

New Look

What is most apparent is our change in the look of the site. Which was designed and implemented by our good friend Michael Banate. The site continually gets positive comments not only from our viewers but also from other webmasters.

Radio

WPMW Radio CorMariae our Radio Station in New Bedford, MA is well underway with much of the financing in place. Work on the state of the art digital broadcasting studio at the friary is in progress. Negotiations are continuing to expand the coverage area and to secure a transmitter site. Launch date should be this year, hopefully earlier than later.

Our station in the Owego area of NY, near our friary in Maine, NY, WHVM Holy Virgin Mary Radio, is also progressing. We have just launched our Capital Campaign for the station last week. We have opted for a two stage implementation with the first “minimal facility” being on air by May 31, 2010. The second “full power” station will be operational by April 24, 2011 and will cost $200,000 but the station will reach 125,000 people for decades to come. See the site for more details. Keep this in your prayers.

The other four stations we have applied for in Pawcatuck, CT, Stockbridge, MA, Bloomington, IN, and the Chicago area of Illinois are also progressing but are much earlier in the process.

Looking Ahead

Looking ahead we have many projects on the burner including our Liturgy Section that has been in the works for almost a year. We also hope to switch to new software for the site by the end of the year.

We are planning a trip to La Crosse in August 21^st to live stream a Marian Conference there. And usually many others come up along the way.

We will be starting a series of Marian Conferences from Fr. Peter Fehlner at the National Shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe at La Crosse, WI as part of the Marian Catechesis program started by Fr. John Hardon and continued under the guidance of Archbishop Raymond Burke and the FIs at La Crosse, WI. We are expecting more videos from Indiana, Australia and even Italy.

We also hope to do some more live broadcasting even on a regular basis and have more text based content including daily news.

Whew! No wander we are so exhausted. Just writing about all we have done is a project. All for the Immaculate. We are looking forward to the rest of 2010 since there is such great promise for the completion of so many long term projects of ours. Remember, a small donation goes a long way here at AirMaria. Keep us in your prayers and you will be in ours. And stayed tuned to AirMaria.com.

Ave Maria!