No-one watches TV anymore and TV streaming services are popping up all over the place, Trak Yakker is the first one aimed at Australian petrolheads.
Meet Trak Yakker. It’s Australia’s newest streaming service and home to a heap of TV shows that you can no longer watch anywhere else. And there are a bunch of Trak Yakker Originals appearing too.
Full disclosure, MotoFomo is in a hush-hush discussion with Trak Yakker about producing a series of specials…but we’ll say no more about that for now. Even if that weren’t the case, we’re still very keen on the philosophy of Trak Yakker. See, the idea, so we’re told by Trak Yakker’s content coordinator, Dan Everett (pictured with the DustemUp HiLux), is the service isn’t beholden to advertisers to make shows a reality. Gone are the days where you could only take your certain brand of beer out of a certain brand of fridge via a certain brand of fridge slide. There are no ads, either.
And if you’re anything like my household, the ability to watch what you want, when you want and on what you want is where TV’s now at. Gone are the days when you had to sit down at a specific time to watch a specific show. Streaming has changed everything.
While YouTube is considered king of streaming, the problem is the ads and, yeah, you can pay a fee to turn off the ads, but content creators see very little of the coin. You’ve got to have hundreds of thousands of subscribers and millions of views to be making a decent living. So, to supplement, creators do deals with brands and products, whether they disclose it or not…
That’s why we like the subscription funded model of Trak Yakker and other services like it. Consumers pay and creators get to create more, real-world, cool content with creators getting paid well for what they do. No more being beholden to a brand…Nice.
We sat down with Trak Yakker’s content coordinator, Dan Everett, and asked him a few questions about the service, where it came from and where it’s going. If you want to know more, or sign up for an account, click HERE.
MotoFomo: Tell me the background to Trak Yakker? How’d it come about and why?
Dan Everett: Trak Yakker was pretty much a natural progression for a few of us. We’d been working in the 4×4 industry for years producing content for different magazines and shows and always hated how everything had to be tied back to an advertiser. If we couldn’t find an advertiser to support a show about racing at Finke, it just wouldn’t happen. So, we put our heads together and looked overseas at similar niche streaming services and hoped viewers were finally sick of having ads shoved in their face.
MF: Why should be people be excited about it?
DE: You know the old ‘what would you do if money was no object’ kind of questions we ask ourselves occasionally? Trak Yakker is my version of that, I get to finally ask what show would I make if I wasn’t tied to advertisers demands. I won’t give any spoilers yet but it means there’s a whole tonne of shows on the horizon that simply would never be possible before. It’s what excites me and I hope it does the same for people watching too. They’re no longer going to be told the only way to go camping is with a sponsor’s fridge, or if they’re not running a certain tyre they’re behind the eight-ball.
MF: What sort of content will people find on Trak Yakker?
DE: One of my biggest goals from the start was making Trak Yakker the go-to place for adventure content, somewhere you can kick back after a long day and find something to inspire you. I started kicking that goal by filling it with full back seasons of a heap of popular 4WD TV shows, episodes that if you didn’t catch on a Sunday arvo four years ago were previously lost to time but are now in the palm of your hand. As a result it’s bursting at the seams with 4WD and adventure content, caravanning, fishing, 4×4 builds etc. We’re starting to get a bit more general car content in there as well with a strong emphasis on that moving forward.
MF: It says it’s Ad Free…will it always be Ad Free?
Haha absolutely. There are no venture capitalists behind Trak Yakker pushing for top dollar returns, it’s owned by a couple of Aussie blokes with 4x4s in their driveway, boats down the side, and sheds full of bikes. It’s an avenue to produce top-quality Aussie content and provide jobs; shareholder dividends aren’t the goal here.
MF: Is there unique content on Trak Yakker?
DE: We’re looking at content in three categories for Trak Yakker. The most important moving forward for us are what we’re calling our Trak Yakker Originals. Shows produced by us that you’ll never see anywhere else but Trak Yakker. We’ve also got a lot of content that wasn’t originally filmed for us but you’re not going to see anywhere else. As we grow there’s a lot more emphasis being placed on Originals and co-produced content.
MF: Will Trak Yakker-commissioned content only be 4×4 and adventure related or will the brand look to include general automotive content?
DE: Absolutely not. Adventure content will always be our core focus but we’re working with a few creators and producers at the moment to produce some killer motorcycle and car content as well. Expect to see drag racing, rally cars, and hot-rods on Trak Yakker through 2021. Rumour has it the MotoFomo guys are working on a project with us as we speak too.
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