Fresh Tracks+

[ImBillT]

Is it not enough that you are being paid by my local game agency to hunt in our state with their personnel. Now you would like me to pay for a subscription service to watch you do it. All while eroding the opportunities that exist in my state through relentless promotion to non-residents of a limited resource.

Thanks. But no thanks.

I understand your sentiment, and partly agree. I do think that a little more transparency on that issue would have been wise, and people would still have been mad.

Nonetheless, no one is perfect(particularly not myself), and whether I like that one particular issue or not, I like Randy, and he’s never abused anyone to the degree that FB, Amazon, and Google have abused every person on the planet. I’m more than happy to pay a few bucks to avoid YouTube.

 

[jhudson1]

Thanks Randy! Lifetime member.

 

[FlatlanderAZ]

View attachment 194001

Kind of the opposite. I'd really like a little more distance . . .

 

[BT_NVhunter]

Signed up for the month after this hunting season will be lifetime member keep up the good work.

 

[Lilhowie83]

I just bought my subscription. I already like the new platform alot better than YouTube.

 

[Shiningmoon]

Today we launched a new platform we have been working on for many years. It is called Fresh Tracks+, which is what the name implies; Fresh Tracks, plus a lot more. It is brought forth on the premise that we pay for content in one of three ways:

1. With our time by having to sit through ads that mean nothing to us, and/or....

2. With our personal information and privacy by allowing these ad-based big tech companies to build profiles about us based on our behaviors, then sell/rent that information for huge sums of money, or....

3. With a small monthly or annual fee that eliminates items #1 an #2 above.

Some people are fine paying for content under options #1 and/or #2. I get that; it is how they have trained us since the first radio shows were funded by ads and when the first websites started tracking our activities. Yet, many of us have tired of our time and privacy being the currency by which we pay for content.

A bit of history on this project. Matthew and I started looking for our own video distribution platform in 2011 and 2012. We eventually built our own custom video player with a lot of features, at a significant cost. Unfortunately, at the time, delivering video files was more expensive than what could be earned in monetizing such. So, in 2013, we put the project on the shelf.

Roll forward to 2019. With the huge changes in video file technology, emerging infrastructure to better deliver high quality video, and my continued frustration with ad-based technology companies, Matthew convinced me the next step in our business model was to take advantage of these new opportunities and explore our own member-based platform.

Being the skeptic and having been burned once, I decided we needed to poll our audiences. Over the last two year, many of you were kind enough to participate in a lot of surveys we were doing. First, to gauge what new platforms you wanted us to add. Second, to get more information about what reasons you had for wanting different platforms.

From all of that came the plan of Fresh Tracks+. Matthew left his consulting job this spring and started working with RJ, our operations manager, to implement this new idea. It has been a huge undertaking. And it is being launched with many more features yet to come in the next few months.

Below is some highlight of why we have done this and why we are adding it as another option, rather than a replacement of existing options.

1. I believe you should be able to watch content without worrying who is following you around for the sake of skimming your personal information and using that to serve you the next content items or to serve you ads. Worse yet, they develop profiles about you and they rent/sell that profile information to advertisers. I've always hated that and I hate it more each day.

Unfortunately, YouTube is the biggest video distribution platform and likely always will be. And YouTube is the second biggest violator of your personal information and privacy, following the leader of the pack, Facebook. Those are two necessary evils in reaching large audiences.

Yet, if you are like me and you don't want to pay for content with your privacy and personal information, then this new Fresh Tracks+ option is a way for you to enjoy our content without that worry. Yet, knowing some people would rather pay for their content with their time (ads) and their privacy and personal information, we will continue to keep those other platforms in place and allow people to view our content there, albeit released at later dates than when it premiers on FT+.

2. In the surveys, a large number of you answered the same way I did - that you value your time and you would like an option where you don't have to sit through ads about products/services that you have no interest in. I pay a lot of small monthly or annual subscription fees to get my news and other content I want. I no longer have to deal with ads, intrusions, etc. This is a way for people to avoid ads. Some of our old content we put on FT+ will have company logos, as it is prohibitive to go and remove every company presence in that old stuff. But, the new content is being exported during edits as ad-free.

3. Many of you said you want all our content in one place. I share your frustration when we put a 4-episode hunt on YouTube, only to have YouTube scatter all four episodes and not allow us to link them in sequence. On FT+, everything will be in one place and easy to find.

4. I'm tired of being throttled by FB and YT. They don't "censor" us, per se, but they do demonetize our content, which is the same as censorship when using platforms that rely on ads for moving up the algorithm. Why would YT give a demonetized video any positive score in the algorithm if it is not earning any revenue due to their demonetization of "sensitive content?" Answer - they don't push it through the algorithm, rather it goes into a dark hole. This is their backdoor way of censoring content without being accused of censoring. Fine, their platforms and I agreed to their terms of use. But, doesn't mean I'm going to stand still while they do it. Thus, another reason for FT+.

There are a lot of other reasons why we are doing this. Anyone who thinks that guns, knifes, dead animals, cutting meat, etc is going to have a home on popular media distribution platforms five years from now has a more optimistic view of these ad-based tech companies than I do. You saw it this summer when Amazon removed all our content and all other hunting content from the free PRIME model and place that content on a rent/buy option. They keep a large chunk of that money and small producers who provide content end up on the short end. I suspect it is only a matter of time before Amazon tosses hunting from the rent/buy options.

I could go on and on. We are happy to answer more questions on this. We know it is not for everyone, but for many, it is an attractive option.

What you see today has all seasons of Fresh Tracks, including the new Season 9 (no, it won't be going to Amazon). You will find the four seasons of our old show, On Your Own Adventures. You will find our "Lessons Learned" videos, our new fishing series, "Any Fin Goes," our films, many live events, some upcoming content that will be exclusive to FT+, and the content that will roll out on the ad-based platforms later on will be available on FT+ before it is available on YT or FB.

We are adding APPS for your phones and your smart TVs. We hope people will sign up directly with us, to avoid paying 30% to the app platforms, then go download the apps afterwards. Those apps will be ready in the next few weeks.

Thanks for all your support. Lots more to come on this project.

Oh, I almost forgot, if you want to check it out, here is the link - https://www.freshtracks.tv/

You have done a good job selling this and I see the importance of separating yourself from the agenda of the social media “community rules” and sensor-ship (via demonizing, making it hard to find, etc).
Marcus and I are similar in that I don’t pay for any media. However, I am seriously considering this. Your mission of “Creating private land advocates” can be justifiably supported just like my RMEF, MDF, Delta, QF, BHA, NWTF memberships.
It concerns me that you are talking about putting up Unedited vulgarity. I don’t listen to radio but podcasts in the car. There are several podcasts I don’t listen to when my wife, children, or grandchildren are with me due to language. I would not watch videos at home where foul language could be heard throughout the house.
I am one of your biggest fans and share your content freely with others.
Keep up the good work.

 

[rustednuts]

@Big Fin i was listening to the podcast announcing plus. One idea I have is a searchable FAQ section but instead of text it is excerpts from livestreams. I think the video format would be more engaging and would allow you get more value from the questions asked.

 

[Addicting]

It concerns me that you are talking about putting up Unedited vulgarity. I don’t listen to radio but podcasts in the car. There are several podcasts I don’t listen to when my wife, children, or grandchildren are with me due to language. I would not watch videos at home where foul language could be heard throughout the house.

I bet you are a Micro fraction statistic of the the folks who are going to purchase this content. Your the biggest fan to a Finlander who was raised where swearing was a art form.

 

[cedahm]

Signed up. Couple feedback tidbits (apologize if there is a separate thread or mechanism for feedback)

- the player is a little finicky on an iPad. Challenging to get to full screen mode as the player is slightly larger than the screen in landscape orientation.
- Attempting to click on a video to get the info/description (given the video titles and thumbnails don’t include location, species, guests, etc, I was trying to do that a lot) seems to either launch the video, add it to your watchlist or open the info popup (none of those outcomes are necessarily consistent), and when it does pop the description up, other episode descriptions remain on the screen, which is a little distracting
- good to hear a mobile/streaming app is coming
- for those of us that spend a lot of time consuming video content out of cell/wifi service in airplanes and tents, etc, a download option would be outstanding (I did not see any intuitive way to do this on the webpage)

minus those minor annoyances, congrats and thanks!

 

[BoulderBulls]

I understand your sentiment, and partly agree. I do think that a little more transparency on that issue would have been wise, and people would still have been mad.

Nonetheless, no one is perfect(particularly not myself), and whether I like that one particular issue or not, I like Randy, and he’s never abused anyone to the degree that FB, Amazon, and Google have abused every person on the planet. I’m more than happy to pay a few bucks to avoid YouTube.

First I have heard of this, .Any more context?

 

[ImBillT]

First I have heard of this, .Any more context?

Probably not the right thread to get into it.

I am the KING of derailing threads. I’ll try not to at least this one time.

 

[Cornell2012]

Signed up. Couple feedback tidbits (apologize if there is a separate thread or mechanism for feedback)

- the player is a little finicky on an iPad. Challenging to get to full screen mode as the player is slightly larger than the screen in landscape orientation.
- Attempting to click on a video to get the info/description (given the video titles and thumbnails don’t include location, species, guests, etc, I was trying to do that a lot) seems to either launch the video, add it to your watchlist or open the info popup (none of those outcomes are necessarily consistent), and when it does pop the description up, other episode descriptions remain on the screen, which is a little distracting
- good to hear a mobile/streaming app is coming
- for those of us that spend a lot of time consuming video content out of cell/wifi service in airplanes and tents, etc, a download option would be outstanding (I did not see any intuitive way to do this on the webpage)

minus those minor annoyances, congrats and thanks!

I think a lot of these will be addressed once we get the apps through app store approval. Navigation is vastly improved, and there will be the ability to download videos to your device.

 

[Cornell2012]

It concerns me that you are talking about putting up Unedited vulgarity. I don’t listen to radio but podcasts in the car. There are several podcasts I don’t listen to when my wife, children, or grandchildren are with me due to language. I would not watch videos at home where foul language could be heard throughout the house.

First I have heard of this, .Any more context?

This is great feedback. If you notice during the first few episodes of the Hunt Talk podcast, there is some amount of foul language. After a couple episodes we decided that we wanted to be more family friendly (being R rated doesn't help our cause of creating public land advocates), and the podcasts have been clean ever since.

I'll clarify that we do not have plans to publish the unfiltered content. It was a suggestion that people have asked about occasionally and we were toying with maybe complying. I think it is clear that there is some amount of interest in it, but also would alienate some people. If we eventually do publish unfiltered episodes, we'll be careful about access (some sort of opt-in process) so that only the people who actively desire to find that content will come across it.

 

[QuazyQuinton]

How long will the delay be for the FT+ content to be released on the YouTube channel? I'm not quite ready to pay for a subscription, but I sure do look forward to the daily hunt episodes. Now that I know they're on FT+, the pressure is mounting.

QQ

 

[Cornell2012]

We're aiming for a delay of 2 weeks between when the episode is live on FT+ and when we put them on youtube.

 

[MontanaElkHunter25]

I'll be getting the year sub here soon! Looking forward to this season hope 2021 is a huge success and not to much limits due to COVID.

 

[Flatrock]

I'll definitely be signing up for a yearlong subscription. Might not be til hunting season slows down though!

 

[MontanaElkHunter25]

I'll definitely be signing up for a yearlong subscription. Might not be til hunting season slows down though!

I feel it im thinking the same thing but haven't made up my mind yet

 

[mxracer317]

Just subscribed for the year. Thank you @Big Fin for polling your audience and then coming through with what we asked for.

May I offer a suggestion? Please put “episode aired date” in the heading so we have a way of knowing what stuff is new content and which is previously aired.

 

[NMGuy]

Not sure if it's possible or not, but you might consider adjusting the contrast between the full volume bar and the black background. I was only able to find it by dumb luck, but maybe it's just my eyes?