GoPro on 60 Minutes

Having used a Contour for the past 2 years for paintball I think that it’s a superior design to the GoPro. To be fair it’s because the Contour has a smaller form factor which is important in paintball as you want to keep a small profile, that and it’s easier to mount to the gear. Still, there’s guys who will mount the big boxy GoPro on top of their visor making it an easy target. I will concede that GoPro’s got some higher resolution options and a better video tweaking ability.

Contour has had trouble competing and closed this year, but I believe was bought out and I hope they make a comeback. I think GoPro rose to the top of the market due mostly to good marketing, and Contour couldn’t keep up. Then there’s the Red7 camera developed specifically for paintball and marketed through paintball celebrity Greg Hastings, but I haven’t looked into it much. http://www.r7usa.com/

And just for giggles here’s our highlight video from Living Legends 6 in Chicago earlier in the year, shot with Contours set at 720p. I may or may not be the troll shooting people point blank with a pump rifle as they ran in my bunker…

Small world. You ever look into the Drift Innovation cameras? They strike me as the common ground between the GoPro and Contour. Buddy bought one for paintball (also Chicagoland) and snowboarding but I have yet to see footage. I would like something that fits well on a marker down the road.

GoPro 4k looks awesome specwise but, like you said, it doesnt fit anywhere that my DSLR couldnt go :slight_smile:

Interesting that GoPro makes its founder a billionaire, while Contour can’t even stay in business. I think Contour did a better i.d. job, but GoPro’s marketing strategy was a lesson in how to go after the intended target market.

That’s awesome !

GoPro’s stock has been on a free fall for the past year. Either they’re getting bought or going private.

Great !!

I think GoPro is one of the best modern-era case studies of how to market and succeed in your product design based business.
Kinda shows that everything doesnt have to be social media app based now to be succesful, theres still hope for industrial design :laughing:

  • it also proves the importance of sales&marketing vs. the more perfect design (in the GrPro vs. Contour case).

Another entry into the action camera arena.

If I had bought GoPro stock on the day that story aired on 60 Minutes I would have less than a quarter of my investment today. :open_mouth:

It seems like when something hits 60 minutes, that’s the signal that it can only go down.

Though, it has been a strange few years in product. Fitbit was near $50/share 2 years ago, $5 today. Fitbit and GoPro both had explosive sales, but quickly saturated the market and the petered out.

Perhaps the product adoption curve has shrunk around tech. It feels like a life cycle that would have taken 10 years before, now takes 2-3 years.

LOL, we always used to say at my last job that CES award was a sign that a product was going to bomb! :laughing:

I think there is room for meaningful tech. I’m sorry, but Fitbit and GoPro are at best a temporary distraction and most definitely not meaningful.

Agreed. Hype > Actual use case.

Fitbit activity monitor sounds like a cool thing. Reality though is that if you are already active, you don’t need a plastic bracelet to tell you to walk or if you walked 10,000 steps. If you aren’t active, a fitbit won’t make you be active. Sure you might want to do a bit more/less, but it’s not the life changing device that people had in mind when they got caught up with the media hype of a “connected/smart/IoT” lifestyle.

GoPro I can at least see a good use case for…

R

Richard: I think the problem with Go Pro and Fitbit is limited market size. Once those markets have bought the product, there is no reason to make another purchase for 3-5 years until the tech gets substantially better (memory, speed, resolution, inter-connectivity, etc) or the first one breaks. Both these companies saturated their market so fast that they ran out of customers before they got to that replacement wave.

That and competitors are moving into the space. Garmin has coming at fitbit pretty hard with more features and great accuracy, and their are a host of GoPro competitors that do it just as well for a better price. I think both brands has really established themselves in the space but they need to keep the pedal down and continue to advance to stay on top.

It’s been a bad week for GoPro.

what’s GoPro??

I have a Hero 4 Black that I purchased a few years ago for mountain biking and diving, and I completely agree with this. It’s a huge amount of money to spend to update to a new product that isn’t substantially better. I think that they would be better off focussing on the smaller session cameras and providing a range of shell accessories to change the form factor for different activities. I.e on my downhill bike I’d prefer a more elongated camera attached to the side of my helmet than a bulky square box hanging out of my visor ( as it has been ripped off on branches and various crashes).

Andy - how are GoPro with software, and updates to their software or what you can do with the cameras? I’ve heard reviews of the Session being somewhat limited in that there’s just a simple on-off button. Not sure if GoPro has a razor-blade type business model that lets them keep getting $ for subscriptions or updates to UI or image/digital functionality. I still want one though.