GoPro Evolution: From 35mm Film To America's Fastest-Growing Camera Company

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2013/03/04/gopro-evolution-from-35mm-film-to-americas-fastest-growing-camera-company/

by thealexknapp • 13 years ago

54 28 13 years ago

forbes.com

nawitus4• 13 years ago

It'll be interesting to see if they can compete with cameraphones. GoPro does have a few differentation strategies. First is that they'll offer higher quality video than phones. However, the video quality on phones will get better all the time, and the difference in quality will become smaller every year.

Another strategy is that they can compete with price. Consumers can always buy a case and a strap to house their smartphone in, but if you're filming sports there's a quite high risk to destroy the phone. The price of GoPro-style video cameras will go down over time (if they won't constantly add new features in), but the cost of phones will probably stay high in the future.

Consumers will likely choose the $79 camera instead of risking their $500 phone to film sports.

nicholassmith• 13 years ago

The quality difference isn't super far off, but I don't think the main target audience for GoPro is going to disappear to using camera phones. There's just too much of an industry built round them now, they can survive a huge chunk of damage and keep rolling, there's all sorts of mounts and and attachments and so on.

Retric• 13 years ago

There is always going to be a significant low light advantage to having a larger lense and sensor. Add a mourning bracket / wrist strap, improved noise reduction and there is only so close a camera phone can get.

nawitus4• 13 years ago

Yes, that's true, but when camera phones will be as good as e.g. Canon 5D Mark iii (and they will, relatively soon even) then that quality will be good enough for practically everyone. At that point only professionals need better quality.

jevinskie• 13 years ago

A GoPro doesn't have the same pressures placed on its thickness that a smartphone has. It can afford to have a lens that is deeper than 5 mm while people expect phones to get thinner and thinner. A deeper lens can afford you better optical quality.

hmbg• 13 years ago

In the foreseeable future, the form factor of a phone makes it impractical to e.g. strap on your helmet, while the more cubical gopro would be a very impractical handset.

mikek• 13 years ago

The competition for the GoPro isn't cellphones. It's Google Glass.

raverbashing• 13 years ago

That is, if Google Glass is waterproof/shockproof etc

Oh and GoPros are not only tied to a person, but often tied to objects (like bikes, airplanes, boats, etc)

cdawzrd• 13 years ago

Yup. You can't take 6 Google Glasses and suction-cup them all over a car.

rplnt• 13 years ago

It's neither probably. Their competition is other "action" cameras within more convenient packages. Luckily for GoPro they still excel in video quality (in their category).

SideburnsOfDoom• 13 years ago

Yes. I was thinking particularly of the #2 action camera vendor, Contour ( http://contour.com/ ) as the GoPro's main competition right now.

Though Google glass and whoever competes with it will get there too, eventually.

Tyrant505• 13 years ago

Then you would need a waterproof and shockproof cell smart phone?

3327• 13 years ago

The key to GoPro is content. As the saying goes, "Content is King". Camera Phones just do not create contact, "on Par" with a goPro generally speaking. Think of your average Camera Phone user, and average Gopro user... The average content generated from the goPro, although - probably not impressive like the footage you see in the adverts, is still going to be superior to average content from a phone camera. Naturally the goPro user has acquired the camera because his average state when using the camera is "something Exciting", and, the average state of the average phone camera user (when grabbing footage) is perhaps "I will share this with my friends" or "this looks cool" (whatever you want to label it).

alexcroox• 13 years ago

Absolutely, I built a passion project a couple of years ago because I found so many amazing videos I wanted to share. They just all happened to be GoPro ones! http://goproheroes.com/gopro-hero3-black-edition-smaller-lig...

It's also worth mentioning they are the only company I know that gives away everything they sell to one lucky winner every single day!

morefranco• 13 years ago

Awesome post - really interesting to see the evolution and how it was all started without the help of sites like Kickstarter (seems like that's where they would have started if the GoPro was about to come out today).

subsystem• 13 years ago

Meh, consumer news.

As far as I know the GoPro is based on Ambarella’s platforms. Here are some specifications, a teardown and a look at their newest platform:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1nsYd3lG60 http://www.ambarella.com/products/consumer-hybrid-cameras.ht... http://www.anandtech.com/show/6652/ambarella-announces-a9-ca...

farabove• 13 years ago

GoPro's success is based on one thing, It does it's job very well.

faramarz• 13 years ago

Not to down play the immense success, but having a prominent Silicon Valley VC father and a 100k initial investment on his part must have been crucial in getting the injection mouldings done and ready for volume production.

That was pre-kickstarter days. Kickstarter has levelled the playing ground for other hardware entrepreneurs in getting early support to pay for the tooling and moulding process.

pkteison• 13 years ago

I'm really impressed by the timeline on the article. Appears to be implemented with https://github.com/athletics/infostory ; anybody know if this was this custom made just for Forbes, or even just for this article? Seems like a ton of effort for a small detail, but it really enhanced the article for me.

Edit: Better googling yields this article which talks a little bit about the timeline, so definitely not just for the article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/lewisdvorkin/2012/09/13/inside-f...

jagermo• 13 years ago

Oh, yes, please. I really love this, that would open up so much possibilities for storytelling.

jellisnyc• 13 years ago

Hi, I'm one of the partners at Athletics. We originally developed the timeline custom for Forbes and have wanted to push this a bit further at some point, hence the repo. Really glad you liked it.

Where credit's due: The Forbes team developed the GoPro feature using our toolkit as a starting point. (We did the timeline in Lewis D'Vorkin's post that you referenced.)

GoPro Evolution: From 35mm Film To America's Fastest-Growing Camera Company

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