GoPro Going going Gone??

[jhwalker]

f you believe in miracles, this would be a good time to buy GoPro stock...

http://www.latimes.com/business/technol ... story.html

[SVTRonDogg]

Buddy of mine got laid off along with quite a few others a few months back.

The product is stale IMO and the Karma drone was an instant failure. I had been eyeing it as a cheap stock but I don't have much faith in the company or the CEO. Best case they sell their assets or license the name?

[SonicVenum]

Something that really hurt them is the saturation in the market. There are SO MANY knock offs out there that work good enough for the price break they give consumers. I think it was too difficult for GoPro to stay innovative enough to keep ahead of the cheap knock offs, or slightly different, more cost-effective competitors. I've thought about picking up this kind of camera (which I haven't), but never considered getting a GoPro because of the price. There are only so many Ken Block crews in the world using 30-40-50 cameras at once on a shoot.

Any chance their products were too good? If your old GoPro is still plugging along doing exactly what you need it to, there's no need to drop another $300+ on the newest model.

[Tetge]

Cell phone video, at least what my niece shoots with her current Apple, is pretty good now, and the phones pack enough memory to shoot long videos, so, I am sure that cell phones have hurt all stand alone cameras. Also, GoPro has been churning their product line with new versions constantly. But, the lens of a GoPro has remained a weak spot in spite of all the features. So, with each new GoPro, one needs a different battery as their old spares will not work, and I, at least, have had issues over the years when trying to process GoPro raw video. Back in the beginning, as a very early GoPro adapter, I had tons of issues with the lo res .avi files, for instance. GoPro was still just getting started, and I am sure that I was in frequent communication with the founders, and they blamed me, WinXP (it was that long ago), and my computer. There was absolutely nothing wrong on their end. But, of course, it was them, as usual. I actually believed them initially, and I built a new computer from scratch and did a fresh install of Windows, and it still didn't work. Now, they are a bit more sophisticated as they have processing software available, but, it is still limited and a bit fussy. In any case, I only got a Hero4 because it has a touch screen back so I can preview video and operate the camera better. I still shoot 1080p at ~30 FPS, and the Hero3 that I have will do that. They said that the sound recording quality was significantly better for the 4 compared to the 3, but I did not find that to be the case.

Still, they sucked me in as they improved the camera, at least in terms of changing to rechargeable batteries and better resolution. But, now, I am tired of their latest and greatest approach. I have an old Olympus digital camera that is 20 years old, or so, and still ticking along. It was a top of the line 3.2 megapixel camera and it required a person to have Windows 98 installed with at least 64MB of memory to deal with its files. I have dropped it and abused it and it still takes pictures, although I have to feed it a couple of high quality expensive AA Energizer Ultimate Lithium batteries, which last so much longer than any other battery that the cost is well worth it.

On the converse side of the coin, when my GoPro2 started to have issues with it's memory slot, and finally refused to read the memory card at all, I checked with GoPro about a repair, as I was off warranty, and they flat out stated that the cameras were not repairable, and were basically throw away's if they had a failure. I still got a new Hero3 to replace the failed one, but, I stopped removing the memory to use a faster card reader to remove video files from the camera and I now use the UBS connector and never remove the memory. This works, but it is much slower. So, I am pretty much done with GoPro, and, I expect my $400+ GoPro4 to last a long time. If it doesn't, that would be one more strike.

At this point, GoPro has a household name and the cameras are widely distributed, even at Costco, where supplies of the GoPro4's are not appearing to be jumping off the display, even at a reduced price. So, perhaps time has caught up to them, although I am betting that the shrewd founders are nicely fixed at this point. The cameras still have applications, but, the pipeline may have become filled with action cameras, much as youtube has so many videos now that it takes something special to get any notice compared to only a few years ago. Not sure if there is a bright future for GoPro at this point.

[jhwalker]

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/gopro- ... 2015-11-12 some folks made some dough-ray-me...

[xbacksideslider]

It's amazing how many people want to make movies of themselves doing illegal things.

Tetge, yes, those lenses lose it for me.
When someone figures that out, then I'd be interested in something like a GoPro