GoPro on 60 Minutes

Interesting that GoPro makes its founder a billionaire, while Contour canā€™t even stay in business. I think Contour did a better i.d. job, but GoProā€™s marketing strategy was a lesson in how to go after the intended target market.

Thatā€™s awesome !

GoProā€™s stock has been on a free fall for the past year. Either theyā€™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, thatā€™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. Iā€™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 donā€™t need a plastic bracelet to tell you to walk or if you walked 10,000 steps. If you arenā€™t active, a fitbit wonā€™t make you be active. Sure you might want to do a bit more/less, but itā€™s not the life changing device that people had in mind when they got caught up with the media hype of a ā€œconnected/smart/IoTā€ lifestyle.

GoPro I can at least see a good use case forā€¦

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.

Itā€™s been a bad week for GoPro.

whatā€™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. Itā€™s a huge amount of money to spend to update to a new product that isnā€™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 Iā€™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? Iā€™ve heard reviews of the Session being somewhat limited in that thereā€™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.

GoPro give you firmware updates to the cameras for free, so thereā€™s no ongoing cost after purchase except for different mounts. The editing software is included with the camera and auto detects/asks if you want to update. Itā€™s ideal for a quick video edit or export, but is by no means a pro level editing program.

Iā€™ve only played with the session camera for a few moments. You can change the settings using the app on your phone, but I donā€™t think that there are buttons to do it on the actual camera, which I can see being super annoying if you want to quickly switch between photo and video. An advantage of the bigger version I have is that I can change modes and make any tweaks to the video settings (resolution, ISO, frame rate etc) on the camera itself.



something that is overlooked about gopro is that they owned both the consumer & prosumer marketsā€¦lots of filmmakers & productions would rock with goproā€™s as maybe a b camera, definitely c, d, e, f, camerasā€¦they were relatively cheap, they produced usable quality video, fairly robust, pretty much always in focus, are tiny enough to stick places you couldnā€™t or wouldnā€™t want to put an expensive camera, and came with an editing suite to extract a little extra ability to edit filesā€¦

some of goproā€™s downturn maybe is connected to the movie business shrinking, increased competition (some of the knockoffs/cheaper no name companies cameras produce footage at least as good if not better in some ways) not only from cheaper cameras, but also bigger sensor mirrorless cameras that cost about the same (or less!) as a new goproā€¦gopro also missed an opportunity with drones early on, dji is the biggest consumer drone maker & their 1st few drones came with options for mounting a gopro! eventually dji made its own all-in-one solution and gopro i think partnered with the now defunct 3dr consumer droneā€¦

i believe gopro do, or at least used to, have a paid ā€˜pro levelā€™ editing suite that would process the raw footage into cineform or something, not sure if it was used by pros thoughā€¦

i donā€™t think the session has been very successful, not so much because of its form factor or functionality (adding an additional button or 3 wouldnā€™t hurt, though on an action cam on button operation makes sense for in the moment start & stop recording as well as maybe less water seals) but its price and feature set relative to the regular goproā€¦sure it is smaller but it isnā€™t like the gopro is much bigger and you get more featuresā€¦especially when you consider that the previous generation(s) gopro is just as capable as the session and costs even less, and the waterproof case isnā€™t that much of an inconvenience considering the use caseā€¦

i think iā€™ve had every generation, if not version of gopro (except for any sessions)ā€¦the interface has come a long way with the recent touch screen version and it a more capable camera than it has ever been, if their pricing changed i feel like they would at least sell more cameras