GoPro's are most useful in situations you wouldn't want your phone near (mounted on a helmet, attached to the outside of a car, underwater, etc). They tie in with phones though so you see the current video from your camera on your phone (handy if the mount is in an awkward spot).
It is clearly a nitch in the market place but is it large enough to sustain and grow in a publicly traded company? That is the question.
Mobile phones are only going to start taking bigger bites out of the market. And sure we may not mount our phones on submarines or airplane wings like we could a GoPro but apart from the extreme cases, our phones will be much more convenient than another piece of hardware right?
Right now GoPros seem to be mostly in the extreme sports/recreation community. When I mention them to friends & family I often hear "what's a gopro?".
I think that there are a ton of use cases in markets they haven't broken into, or among more casual users. If every urban biker in the western world bought one, that's a $BN company right there.
As they get cheaper/better there are things like dashboard cams that you wouldn't use your phone for, so I think they have plenty of market left to grow into.
So we agree that there is opportunity for some growth in the POV camera marketplace but disagree in how much there really is.
You mention "every urban biker in the western world" but unless GoPro figures out someway to make it necessary for every biker in the western world to have a camera attached to their bike how on earth is this a realistic goal to shoot for? That is like saying Redbull is shooting to get their product into the hands of every athlete...it's a silly assumption.
People didn't put lights on their bikes at night until about 15 years ago when low-weight, bright LEDs became cheap and ubiquitous.
Any city cyclist will tell you about all the close calls and accidents they've had, so it's just a matter of making a camera that's rugged and cheap enough to meet the demand. GoPro has rugged down, now they just need to come down in price and maybe up in usability.
I think it's different from the Red Bull example because red bull doesn't really offer anything that tons of cheap competitors don't already offer, and with taste being what it is there's no 'default' drink to capture the whole market.
If gopro just became 'the dash-cam' company, and any time you bought a new bike or car it was a $50 add-on at the register, I think they'd clean house.
Of course we're a ways from a stabilized HD camera being an impulse buy, but they're probably the best positioned company to get there. Then they just have to fight commoditization, which is a nice problem to have.
> People didn't put lights on their bikes at night until about 15 years ago when low-weight, bright LEDs became cheap and ubiquitous
Perhaps this is different in the US, but in the UK people were definitely putting lights on their bikes way before then, because if you didn't you were liable to get stopped by the police. Having a light on your bike in the UK has been the law for at least 30 years.
A light, maybe. Now it's not uncommon for a frequent night biker or city bike commuter to have several very visible LEDs on their bike and gear -- a far step up from the dim battery powered lights of 30 years ago.
I'm not sure about "necessary" but dash cams make even more sense for bikers. The default response for police in car-bike traffic accidents is to assume the biker did something stupid and let the driver go or worse, issue a ticket to the biker without any evidence at all.
I bring up Redbull because there you have a company that was able to profit more-so from it's brand than their product. Their brand created more value in the company than the product they were making.
GoPro has a similar mission as Redbull I think, therefore they would be wise to follow the lead Redbull has already proven successful.
Pfft. A sports shoe company? How could that ever be a big enough market to support a public company?[1][2]
A company like Garmin has made an art of growing revenues in markets that are supposed to be eaten by mobile phones. For example, their fitness division (which is basically GPS Cycling Computers and Watches) made $83 million in Q2 2013[3]. Everything Garmin bike computers do you can get an iPhone app to do instead. But people (including me) buy them because they are SO MUCH BETTER than using a phone.
Incidentally, Garmin introduced their GoPro competitor at the end of 2013.
Also worth noting there is no reason GoPro has to stay limited to cameras.
The GoPro is normally used in situation where some preparation was already done (e.g. register for some activity, prepared your gear, trained for the occasion) and the "best camera is the one you have with you" adage doesn't fit as much.
Putting you mobile phone in some hardened case and using it as a camera would be OK, but you might want to keep your camera running while you use your phone for other purposes (GPS, actually calling someone, listen to music...), and you wouldn't want to lose your phone in the middle of a mountain.
I think one thing you're missing is that GoPro cameras are basically a consumable product for many higher end filmmakers. Look at the X-Games. Every athlete had one in at least one place on their body. They usually don't even have the waterproof housing on them, because they don't care if they break them.
Yes, the average consumer is only going to buy one every few years, but there are business that will buy hundreds or thousands.
I think there are other places they could move the business also. They could do other kinds of sensors, heads up displays, lots of things that aren't necessarily cameras.
It is clearly a nitch in the market place but is it large enough to sustain and grow in a publicly traded company? That is the question.
Certainly! We're talking about people who are very interested in expensive hobbies (like skiing, snowboarding, motorbiking), these people are very used to spending a lot of money on their hobby. Combine that with the innate human desire to want to record/photo/share our lives, and the market for "allowing people to record their expensive hobbies" is very lucrative.
