Go Pro have nearly gone bust. All the shops around here which stocked them heavily, with the dedicated display stands and movie players, have almost cleared their stock out and the stands are empty.
Sony have not brought out a successor to the X3000 despite there being a clear market need for 50/60fps at 4K. Everybody does 4K but very few do more than 25/30fps.
And Sony make most of the sensors used by everybody else, so they can see exactly which way the market is heading.
Maybe it just got saturated. Go Pro did a massive marketing campaign and must have captured nearly the whole market.
Maybe people decided that getting good results is too hard. Let’s face it, most action cam footage is below dreadful, which nobody will watch more than once. Especially on facebook where you can’t really watch something more than once even if you wanted to (because it scrolls off into oblivion).
Maybe almost nobody wanted to edit movies to make them watchable. Remember laptops, particularly pricey Sony laptops, 15 years ago? Optimistically, they had 1394 ports for transferring data from DV tape camcorders. Everybody was supposed to get into home movies. Virtually nobody did, because (a) most people don’t know how to shoot (b) you need a much more powerful laptop than the ~2003 winXP ones were (c) the editors have a long learning curve.
Maybe most people can get what they want with a phone camera. Compared to say the X3000, phones have rubbish stabilisation, less dynamic range, are hard to hold for shooting, etc, but you always have it with you.
Maybe people realised that even if they produced something nice, they cannot upload it anywhere which will do it justice – well not at any price they want to pay. No normal person will pay $100/month for a video account which will store a terabyte of your stuff and can serve video at 25mbps for HD or 100mbps for 4K. Vimeo does 5mbps and 20mbps for HD and 4K respectively… This aspect has actually not moved on for years now and probably won’t for years more, especially as youtube manages to stay in business serving mostly low quality junk. Maybe the business model is too hard because you have to employ loads of people to watch everything to check it for dodgy stuff.
Peter wrote:
Maybe most people can get what they want with a phone camera. Compared to say the X3000, phones have rubbish stabilisation, less dynamic range, are hard to hold for shooting, etc, but you always have it with you.
I guess that is what the main thing is, not only for action cams but generally. Almost nobody carries expensive cams anymore, let alone full equipment bags of 20 kg or more, if for 99% of what they want to do, their phone does the same or better job.
I don’t think however that go-pros and the likes are gonna go away, there are just too many applications for them which can’t be done with phones. Still, if you consider that even normal smartphones today come with 4k resolution which now appears to be the bees knees even though the data volume is ferocious and for most online watching full HD is more than enough, not all that many people are willing to upgrade their photo equimpent on a yearly basis. Maybe the action cams which were sold two years ago still are good enough for most people not to consider an upgrade? Personally I have not upgraded my photo equipment for years and am quite ok with my Samsung S8Note plus my Nikon P500 for where the phone doesn’t do what I need.
Yes, GPRO $80 to $5. IIRC initial high valuation was based on promises of making money on the content. Sharing platform of some kind.
Maybe more people realized that unless you’re in the top 1% of your sport/hobby, nobody’s going to watch?
Another thing is privacy. I’m more concerened about uploading the stuff I do to Youtube than say 10 years ago.
Not unusual for a tech company 
Their products were very overpriced compared to other alternatives but were cheap compared to the average cost of those extreme hobbies to be filmed.
They were the first to get into that niche market and their go pro-hero line of product was a success but it gets saturated quickly so they need to expand beyond that 5% base and produce “GoNormal” product for everybody to keep on their financial success, their expansion attempts were to other niche markets such as drones/sphere/arial cameras, these have failed as these market seems more secured by other companies like DJI
Their other alternative is to keep in the top 5% market and play the service/subscription card with sharing/editing platforms as loco mentioned?
Or just get something for everybody like Sony does and keep things light and short?
Also, unlike with a smartphone good luck sharing a GoPro video as it is and you have to do it in the moment not after you next free weekend
On my last trip to Africa, I did not take a DSLR camera with me anymore, but only my iPhone X, 2 Moment add-on lenses (wide angle and telelens) as well as a few action cameras and one 360 degrees camera. I only touched the action cameras once and might not take them along anymore. 95% of the video I shot was with my iPhone X. The rest was done with the 360 video camera. It is so much easier to shoot video with your iPhone. The results are there on your phone instantly and you don’t have to waste time loading videos into editing software, etc.
However, there is one GoPro “thing” that I use all the time and that is their app “Quick” which allows you to make a quick compilation video combining pictures and videos. It takes less than a few minutes to compile and takes away the hassle of editing videos afterwards. I have uploaded to YouTube a sample video created with Quick where I only selected some of the pictures and videos shot from my iPhone and let Quick create the video for me. No editing done.
GoPro Quick Generated video:
I think your video, Aeroplus, illustrates my point It is of course a currently fashionable way of making videos; all the rage these days to cut everything into short sharp fragments, but few will watch it more than once.
And the % of people who make a video to teach someone, or show something to someone, is just too tiny a market.
It is hard to beat a camcorder for video quality, stabilisation, etc (I still have a Canon G40 which does HD at 50/60fps) but that market is even more dead.
The point is that I would not even film = record many events in the past as video due to the hassles of taking the camera out of the bag or not having the camera ready. Now, with my iPhone, I have it with me all the time, so many shots and short video clips are there thanks to having the mobile phone ready to take the shot.
IMHO you should choose the tools for the job and not the job for the tools. I have just ordered 2 go pro 5 hero black cameras for 2 charities (Wildlife SOS and Friendicoes) which I support in India. For many reasons they are the right tools for the job, and would be very difficult if not impossible with other cameras.
Peter you are right about editing fashions. In the early 80’s a magic digital editing system by Quantel entered the market, it was expensive and only purchased by high end video edit companies making commercials.These companies needed to make a good return on their investment so they sold out of hours slots on their machines with editors at a much reduced rate. One of the biggest users of this were the pop video makers and the directors tended to use every editing effect that Quantel could offer, hence early pop videos were packed full of split screens zooming and swooping frames etc. Once the fashion wore off people learnt to use these effects to suit the purpose.
Today’s consumer editing software and hardware are very limited in the type of editing you can achieve, although they can do many things at the push of a button which would have been difficult or time consuming on film or in the early days of video, they do not do the simple things well. For that you need to spend quite a lot of money (for a non professional) although nowhere near the cost of a Quantel.
Peter wrote:
Remember laptops, particularly pricey Sony laptops, 15 years ago? Optimistically, they had 1394 ports for transferring data from DV tape camcorders. Everybody was supposed to get into home movies. Virtually nobody did, because (a) most people don’t know how to shoot (b) you need a much more powerful laptop than the ~2003 winXP ones were (c) the editors have a long learning curve.
It was done right on the Mac. I used my PowerMac G4 (which has a 1394 port) quite a lot for video editing, and the free video editor that came with OSX was actually pretty easy to use and did a good job. None of the Windows video editing software (especially the free stuff that came with firewire cards, which were universally dreadful to use and often had weird skeuomorphic user interfaces) could hold a candle to iMovie.
Point (a) is a good one. Look at how many vertical videos people shoot. All they have to do is rotate their phone 90 degrees to make a proper aspect ratio video, but so many people don’t.
iMovie had a pretty easy learning curve for 99% of tasks you’d want to do with video (insert and edit clip lengths, add audio tracks, change audio track volumes, transitions and titling), but that still doesn’t take away from the fact you often need to shoot an hours video for every 5 minutes of the final product (and you also have to spend probably an hour per 5 minutes of video).
Peter wrote:
All the shops around here which stocked them heavily, with the dedicated display stands and movie players, have almost cleared their stock out and the stands are empty.
Partly due to the new marketing policy of GoPro with a new European distributor demanding unrealistic minimum order quantities.
