January 2010

2009 was an amazing year. One tongue in cheek review of the year can be found here from Jib Jab
For us, it has been a great year of growth. We have grown on our reputation of local ownership, local service and local support and we have grown because of great recommendations from our customers to friends and new community members. Thank you.

We always like to celebrate the past and look forward to the future.

What's in store in our future?

We are moving closer to being paperless. This newsletter is the start. We won't be printing it and including it in each bill for a while and monitoring how many of you read it online. If it serves your needs and helps us save the planet then we will continue to do it, but if we find that most of you are not reading it online, we will go back to a bill stuffer for those of you that get electronic bills. It's important that we stay in touch. One key difference as you have discovered, is that the newsletter is not a document but a series of postings. This allows us to post information in a timely manner. Honestly, the paper bills go out several times a month depending on your billing cycle. Many of you would be reading news I wrote about at the beginning of one month an entire month later and it just didn't make sense. This is new and I'm always open to feedback, so please stay in touch and let me know what you think.

We are working hard on extending our contract with the city to continue to provide TV service. We will be sending our annual quality survey out soon, so please take a moment to take the survey and let us know what you think about our company, offerings, employees and your experiences.

We are building and testing new DVR solutions everyday. Some work great and we will be sharing those online.

We are recommitting ourselves to be a proud sponsor of the Ashland Independent Film Festival. The festival runs April 8-12, 2010 and information can be found on the website at http://www.AshlandFilm.org

I am planning trips to industry tradeshows including CES (Consumer Electronic Show), NAB (National Association of Broadcasting) and The Cable Show. Look for updates on the site as I visit and blog from each show.

We will be redesigning our website to provide a better experience such as this newsletter but also our Mac centric support blog (http://www.ashlandapplehq.com/Welcome.html)

We are the largest AFN ISP and the only Ashland based ISP and we take this very seriously. We will be working with other AFN ISPS as well as AFN directly to ensure that the system will grow and change over time to continue to support the needs of our community.

Speaking of AFN… AFN will be 10 years old next month, so look for some of my thoughts on AFN and its history and future next month.

The Winter Olympics are coming and we have a special Olympics package if you do not have Ashland TV and would like it only for the duration of the Olympics. Call our office at 541.488.9207 (Remember you have to dial 541 now) to ask for details and schedule a flat rate deal.

Thank you for making 2009 our best year ever, we look forward to serving your needs into 2010 and beyond.