10 ms·

GoPro has discontinued its developer program

115 points by byteCoder 9y ago

bob_theslob646 9y ago
Why would they do this?
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  They're getting ready to sell themselves. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/gopro-shares-pare-huge-loss-on-report-company-is-exploring-sale-2018-01-08 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/gopro-shares-pare-huge-los...
  - winslett 9y ago
    I've got my money on Redbull buying them.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - culturestate 9y ago
      GoPro has a huge professional market as well; you might be surprised at the amount of footage you see on TV and in movies that's shot on a GoPro. If I had to guess on an acquisition I might look at Canon or Nikon, but the reality is probably PE.
  - ActsJuvenile 9y ago
    My money is on DJI buying them.
    - dylan604 9y ago
      I wouldn't be so sure DJI already makes better cameras. For whatever reason, DJI made a decision to go their own way. Maybe irreconcilable differences with GoPro, maybe GoPro unwilling to work with them, whatever the reason, DJI cameras have long since marginalized the need to a GoPro on their gear.
  - exikyut 9y ago
    I wonder if quiet negotiations are already happening and this shutdown was to court a potential offer.
- aphextron 9y ago
  They're finished as a company. They never were able to innovate beyond "it's an HD camera with wifi", and low priced competition ate them up.
  - ClassyJacket 9y ago
    Exactly, a hundred Chinese companies can pump out cameras like theirs. What they had going for them was their genericized trademark of a name - people calling all action cameras GoPros - which eventually would have or did come back and bite them. Their stock price is less than a tenth what it once was.
    - ravenstine 9y ago
      People are buying Chinese action cameras in such droves? Everyone I know with an action camera owns a GoPro. Something seems amiss to me, though perhaps things are different in California. But then why just these cameras? There are plenty of types of devices that have viable Chinese knockoffs for cheap, yet the non-Chinese brands thrive or at least sustain.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - ClassyJacket 9y ago
        That's why I said would have. I don't know whether this has yet occurred to a significant degree or not. I just can't imagine any investor confidence in something that's so easy clones by generics, especially when people were using the trademarked name for the general product category.
      - dylan604 9y ago
        If you own a GoPro, you probably have had to buy a second one. I personally do not know of a single GoPro owner that has not damaged/lost/whatever their camera. After you buy the first one at full price today, do you buy a second one or go out and buy something else? It used to be that you could only get another GoPro, so GoPro sales looked good. Now, for $70, why not try the something else? Based on sales, looks like a lot of people are choosing the latter.
danso 9y ago
GoPro's IPO and initial success was inspiring because it didn't seem any kind of specialized camera/video hardware company could exist outside of the smartphone umbrella -- especially after Flip [0] got bought up not long after the first iPhone. But it seems like there was always going to be a hard ceiling for GoPro. Not just because of the continued improvement of smartphone portability and camera features, but because of the limited potential customer base of sports/travel enthusiasts. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip_Video https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip_Video
- rgbrenner 9y ago
  I agree, but disagree there was a hard ceiling for GoPro. Companies may have an initial success.. but the rest of the world never stands still while they rake in money. Especially not in tech, which gets cheaper every year and can be manufactured fairly easy by competitors. GoPro had an initial success with their camera.. and it was their duty to expand beyond that into other lines of business and diversify their revenue streams. When I hear GoPro, I think cameras (like everyone else).. and that was their failure. There's really nothing about the name "GoPro" that is attached to cameras--it only means that because of their marketing and failure to expand. I don't think there's a reason the name GoPro couldn't be put on a variety of high end outdoor gear--surfboards, snowboards, etc. GoPro could easily stand for pro-level/quality outdoor gear. What's surprising is that they watched other camera manufacturers fail and disappear, and yet didn't pursue other lines vigorously.
  - acjohnson55 9y ago
    That sort of lateral expansion is also a hazard. Many companies have failed at becoming lifestyle brands. For one random example, Evernote tried to launch a marketplace of physical items. Some were really nice. But after a year, they had to shut it down.
  - oceanswave 9y ago
    Not only that, they haven’t kept up in camera tech, but still charge a premium price. Built-in mechanical stabilization, additional sensors such as gps and altimeter, color capture could have justified a premium price. Expansion into the drone market came as too little too late, and the recall hurt that effort immensely. Seems like there are video applicstions outside the ‘action cam’ domain - security, monitoring, etc that players such as nest have gotten into, granted that’s outside their X-treme DNA. So yeah, a sale is probably best for them, but outside their brand, what kind of IP do they really have that boosts their value...
radium3d 9y ago
GoPro could turn themselves around if they supported their customer community by opening up their hardware interfaces more and allowed more robust fine-grain control over aperature, shutter, iso, white balance via usb and wifi/Bluetooth with API support so we developers can create sale-generating software that makes their fantastic hardware more useful. It won't hurt them to open these controls up. Also make streaming to devices in real-time with as low latency as possible would be nice. Also lowering the price couldn't hurt but they do have one of the better waterproof systems out there so maybe that's not feasible? All of this would open up their market to tinkering enthusiasts as well without making things more complex for their existing market.
- atomical 9y ago
  > All of this would open up their market to tinkering enthusiasts as well without making things more complex for their existing market. How much in sales will the tinkering enthusiasts generate?
  - dylan604 9y ago
    If they allowed tinkering with the Hero4, I think quite a lot. Live action VR came to life from using Hero3 & Hero4 cameras right off the shelf. There were people that figured out how to control the hsync & vsync of the Hero3 to help capture stereoscopic recordings. This solution was broken with the Hero4. However the lack of this level of sync made the GoPro footage incredibly difficult to get good stitches in VR. When GoPro teamed up with Google to develop the Odyssey, they created a back pack to communicate with all of the attached cameras to get the desperately needed syncing between all cameras. Not only did all 16 cameras start/stop in sync, all 16 were in hsync & vsync. It's as close to a genlock as one could get with a GoPro. However, this was a closed system as the only way to get these backpacks was with an Odyssey camera system. I tried to acquire additional backpacks to add to the existing 16 to add top and bottom coverage to complete the sphere, but GoPro said no. There are many camera people that love/hate GoPro. Loved because you can put them anywhere, and the picture quality is actually decent for what it is on the Hero4. However, they are crap to work with interface and control wise. Allowing tinkering in this world would also allow camera techs to possibly do some cool stuff that GoPro might not care to invest time. The Canon firmware hack, MagicLantern, specifically comes to mind. The exact same hardware with different programming pretty much makes it a different camera. Canon can't incorporate it, as it would cannibalize their other verticals. GoPro could have embraced/encouraged this level of tinkering as they only really have one camera type.
dessant 9y ago
Off topic, but if anyone from their marketing team reads this, one of the activities[1] on the HERO6 Black sales page[2] is a surefire way to crack your skull open. [1] https://i.imgur.com/ZuOmIrV.jpg https://i.imgur.com/ZuOmIrV.jpg [2] https://shop.gopro.com/EMEA/cameras/hero6-black/CHDHX-601-master.html https://shop.gopro.com/EMEA/cameras/hero6-black/CHDHX-601-ma...
- beinstein 9y ago
  Nah, it's a tricycle!
- rgbrenner 9y ago
  Which one? The one with the guy skateboarding without a helmet? The guy on the edge of a rocky cliff? The guy standing at night on a rock formation on the beach? The women biking without helmets without their feet on the pedals? Or the kayakers going over a waterfall? If I didn't know better, I would think filming yourself cracking your skull open is exactly what they're selling.
- snek 9y ago
  i ride my bike like that all the time
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- mistersquid 9y ago
  That promotional video is fantastic. Beautiful scenery, photogenic people, shots of pristine nature, even the family visiting a theme park inspires a primal kind of longing and deep pride in how awesome it is to be an incarnated human. The score--Odesza's "A Moment Apart" from the album of the same name--contributes to the emotion in no small way. Given the discontinuation of the developer program is in line with the gradual decline of the GoPro brand, the video is at once sublime and forlorn and I can't help but feel GoPro's fate is to be lamented. One can almost read in the GoPro's plight the unavoidable fate of humankind and the planet on which we live. OK, I know all of that is a bit overwrought, and this is my first exposure to Odesza. But I was so affected that I decided to buy the album and, I know, I'm going to put it on repeat for the next month or so. Thanks for the link.
abritinthebay 9y ago
People in here are talking like GoPro’s issues are market related. That’s not true at all. If you know anyone who is or has worked there you know it’s because they are incredibly poorly run. They routinely waste development time on nothing projects, failing to ship code - even bug fixes - for literal years. Their problems come from one of the most disfunctional managing cultures I’ve heard of in the Bay Area - and that’s a high bar.
- atomical 9y ago
  Garmin beat them to the 360. My biggest complaint is that GoPro mounts are cheap and there isn't a high quality gimbal for the GoPro.
  - vvilla 9y ago
    i can tell you one that works well: luuv gimbal
  - abritinthebay 9y ago
    Define high quality? The Smoove is great for example.
    - atomical 9y ago
      I'm looking for a gimbal I can use while running.
      - abritinthebay 9y ago
        I’ve used my Smoove Pro for that, and on a motorboat, so... should work. Also works for phones.
  - noarchy 9y ago
    >My biggest complaint is that GoPro mounts are cheap and there isn't a high quality gimbal for the GoPro. I went through two of GoPro's awful, plastic mounts before buying a metal, third-party mount, and never looked back. The two mounts that broke sent my GoPro careening down asphalt in each case, and I was lucky to both not lose it and to not have it be destroyed. So while the mounts are junk, the unit itself has proved to be very durable.
dylan604 9y ago
The saddest part of GoPro to me is that they own the Cineform codec. I love Cineform, and cried when GoPro acquired it. I liked it better than ProRes to be honest. Apple ProRes won because Apple. I worked for company (said company no longer exists) that was internally talking about purchasing Cineform way before GoPro, somewhere around 2008/09. However, this company was going to submit it for ISO standardization. It's a lovely codec, but it did not take off because it was always surrounded by questions of longevity. GoPro's purchase of it did not improve the longevity question, and made it seem Prosumer at best.
- otsdr 9y ago
  They have open sourced CineForm in October last year ( https://gopro.github.io/cineform-sdk/ https://gopro.github.io/cineform-sdk/ ); also, "SMPTE has standardized the CineForm codec as the SMPTE ST 2073 VC-5 video compression standard".
TaylorGood 9y ago
Gopro would’ve been a beautiful lifestyle business had they stayed private and only did cameras. The weight of scaling post-ICO sank them.
- JBReefer 9y ago
  Do you mean post IPO? Internet funbux should have nothing to do with GoPro - they sell a real product that actually has value.
  - draw_down 9y ago
    Come on. It’s an easy enough typo to make.
  - davidkuhta 9y ago
    Satoshian Slip
  - asterius 9y ago
    The investors didn't want standard returns, the valuation was based on them growing rapidly for years, which means new markets. They could have made money from their drone product line by diversifying beyond 'toy'. But that would have required integration partners, different sales channels etc, and they didn't have the skills to build that.
yabol 9y ago
Any recommendation for alternative camera with good API?

115 points by byteCoder 9y ago

bob_theslob646 9y ago

Why would they do this?

toomuchtodo 9y ago
They're getting ready to sell themselves. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/gopro-shares-pare-huge-loss-on-report-company-is-exploring-sale-2018-01-08 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/gopro-shares-pare-huge-los...
- winslett 9y ago
  I've got my money on Redbull buying them.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - culturestate 9y ago
    GoPro has a huge professional market as well; you might be surprised at the amount of footage you see on TV and in movies that's shot on a GoPro. If I had to guess on an acquisition I might look at Canon or Nikon, but the reality is probably PE.
- ActsJuvenile 9y ago
  My money is on DJI buying them.
  - dylan604 9y ago
    I wouldn't be so sure DJI already makes better cameras. For whatever reason, DJI made a decision to go their own way. Maybe irreconcilable differences with GoPro, maybe GoPro unwilling to work with them, whatever the reason, DJI cameras have long since marginalized the need to a GoPro on their gear.
- exikyut 9y ago
  I wonder if quiet negotiations are already happening and this shutdown was to court a potential offer.
aphextron 9y ago
They're finished as a company. They never were able to innovate beyond "it's an HD camera with wifi", and low priced competition ate them up.
- ClassyJacket 9y ago
  Exactly, a hundred Chinese companies can pump out cameras like theirs. What they had going for them was their genericized trademark of a name - people calling all action cameras GoPros - which eventually would have or did come back and bite them. Their stock price is less than a tenth what it once was.
  - ravenstine 9y ago
    People are buying Chinese action cameras in such droves? Everyone I know with an action camera owns a GoPro. Something seems amiss to me, though perhaps things are different in California. But then why just these cameras? There are plenty of types of devices that have viable Chinese knockoffs for cheap, yet the non-Chinese brands thrive or at least sustain.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - ClassyJacket 9y ago
      That's why I said would have. I don't know whether this has yet occurred to a significant degree or not. I just can't imagine any investor confidence in something that's so easy clones by generics, especially when people were using the trademarked name for the general product category.
    - dylan604 9y ago
      If you own a GoPro, you probably have had to buy a second one. I personally do not know of a single GoPro owner that has not damaged/lost/whatever their camera. After you buy the first one at full price today, do you buy a second one or go out and buy something else? It used to be that you could only get another GoPro, so GoPro sales looked good. Now, for $70, why not try the something else? Based on sales, looks like a lot of people are choosing the latter.

danso 9y ago

GoPro's IPO and initial success was inspiring because it didn't seem any kind of specialized camera/video hardware company could exist outside of the smartphone umbrella -- especially after Flip [0] got bought up not long after the first iPhone. But it seems like there was always going to be a hard ceiling for GoPro. Not just because of the continued improvement of smartphone portability and camera features, but because of the limited potential customer base of sports/travel enthusiasts. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip_Video https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip_Video

rgbrenner 9y ago
I agree, but disagree there was a hard ceiling for GoPro. Companies may have an initial success.. but the rest of the world never stands still while they rake in money. Especially not in tech, which gets cheaper every year and can be manufactured fairly easy by competitors. GoPro had an initial success with their camera.. and it was their duty to expand beyond that into other lines of business and diversify their revenue streams. When I hear GoPro, I think cameras (like everyone else).. and that was their failure. There's really nothing about the name "GoPro" that is attached to cameras--it only means that because of their marketing and failure to expand. I don't think there's a reason the name GoPro couldn't be put on a variety of high end outdoor gear--surfboards, snowboards, etc. GoPro could easily stand for pro-level/quality outdoor gear. What's surprising is that they watched other camera manufacturers fail and disappear, and yet didn't pursue other lines vigorously.
- acjohnson55 9y ago
  That sort of lateral expansion is also a hazard. Many companies have failed at becoming lifestyle brands. For one random example, Evernote tried to launch a marketplace of physical items. Some were really nice. But after a year, they had to shut it down.
- oceanswave 9y ago
  Not only that, they haven’t kept up in camera tech, but still charge a premium price. Built-in mechanical stabilization, additional sensors such as gps and altimeter, color capture could have justified a premium price. Expansion into the drone market came as too little too late, and the recall hurt that effort immensely. Seems like there are video applicstions outside the ‘action cam’ domain - security, monitoring, etc that players such as nest have gotten into, granted that’s outside their X-treme DNA. So yeah, a sale is probably best for them, but outside their brand, what kind of IP do they really have that boosts their value...

radium3d 9y ago

GoPro could turn themselves around if they supported their customer community by opening up their hardware interfaces more and allowed more robust fine-grain control over aperature, shutter, iso, white balance via usb and wifi/Bluetooth with API support so we developers can create sale-generating software that makes their fantastic hardware more useful. It won't hurt them to open these controls up. Also make streaming to devices in real-time with as low latency as possible would be nice. Also lowering the price couldn't hurt but they do have one of the better waterproof systems out there so maybe that's not feasible? All of this would open up their market to tinkering enthusiasts as well without making things more complex for their existing market.

atomical 9y ago
> All of this would open up their market to tinkering enthusiasts as well without making things more complex for their existing market. How much in sales will the tinkering enthusiasts generate?
- dylan604 9y ago
  If they allowed tinkering with the Hero4, I think quite a lot. Live action VR came to life from using Hero3 & Hero4 cameras right off the shelf. There were people that figured out how to control the hsync & vsync of the Hero3 to help capture stereoscopic recordings. This solution was broken with the Hero4. However the lack of this level of sync made the GoPro footage incredibly difficult to get good stitches in VR. When GoPro teamed up with Google to develop the Odyssey, they created a back pack to communicate with all of the attached cameras to get the desperately needed syncing between all cameras. Not only did all 16 cameras start/stop in sync, all 16 were in hsync & vsync. It's as close to a genlock as one could get with a GoPro. However, this was a closed system as the only way to get these backpacks was with an Odyssey camera system. I tried to acquire additional backpacks to add to the existing 16 to add top and bottom coverage to complete the sphere, but GoPro said no. There are many camera people that love/hate GoPro. Loved because you can put them anywhere, and the picture quality is actually decent for what it is on the Hero4. However, they are crap to work with interface and control wise. Allowing tinkering in this world would also allow camera techs to possibly do some cool stuff that GoPro might not care to invest time. The Canon firmware hack, MagicLantern, specifically comes to mind. The exact same hardware with different programming pretty much makes it a different camera. Canon can't incorporate it, as it would cannibalize their other verticals. GoPro could have embraced/encouraged this level of tinkering as they only really have one camera type.

dessant 9y ago

Off topic, but if anyone from their marketing team reads this, one of the activities[1] on the HERO6 Black sales page[2] is a surefire way to crack your skull open. [1] https://i.imgur.com/ZuOmIrV.jpg https://i.imgur.com/ZuOmIrV.jpg [2] https://shop.gopro.com/EMEA/cameras/hero6-black/CHDHX-601-master.html https://shop.gopro.com/EMEA/cameras/hero6-black/CHDHX-601-ma...

beinstein 9y ago
Nah, it's a tricycle!
rgbrenner 9y ago
Which one? The one with the guy skateboarding without a helmet? The guy on the edge of a rocky cliff? The guy standing at night on a rock formation on the beach? The women biking without helmets without their feet on the pedals? Or the kayakers going over a waterfall? If I didn't know better, I would think filming yourself cracking your skull open is exactly what they're selling.
snek 9y ago
i ride my bike like that all the time
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
mistersquid 9y ago
That promotional video is fantastic. Beautiful scenery, photogenic people, shots of pristine nature, even the family visiting a theme park inspires a primal kind of longing and deep pride in how awesome it is to be an incarnated human. The score--Odesza's "A Moment Apart" from the album of the same name--contributes to the emotion in no small way. Given the discontinuation of the developer program is in line with the gradual decline of the GoPro brand, the video is at once sublime and forlorn and I can't help but feel GoPro's fate is to be lamented. One can almost read in the GoPro's plight the unavoidable fate of humankind and the planet on which we live. OK, I know all of that is a bit overwrought, and this is my first exposure to Odesza. But I was so affected that I decided to buy the album and, I know, I'm going to put it on repeat for the next month or so. Thanks for the link.

abritinthebay 9y ago

People in here are talking like GoPro’s issues are market related. That’s not true at all. If you know anyone who is or has worked there you know it’s because they are incredibly poorly run. They routinely waste development time on nothing projects, failing to ship code - even bug fixes - for literal years. Their problems come from one of the most disfunctional managing cultures I’ve heard of in the Bay Area - and that’s a high bar.

atomical 9y ago
Garmin beat them to the 360. My biggest complaint is that GoPro mounts are cheap and there isn't a high quality gimbal for the GoPro.
- vvilla 9y ago
  i can tell you one that works well: luuv gimbal
- abritinthebay 9y ago
  Define high quality? The Smoove is great for example.
  - atomical 9y ago
    I'm looking for a gimbal I can use while running.
    - abritinthebay 9y ago
      I’ve used my Smoove Pro for that, and on a motorboat, so... should work. Also works for phones.
- noarchy 9y ago
  >My biggest complaint is that GoPro mounts are cheap and there isn't a high quality gimbal for the GoPro. I went through two of GoPro's awful, plastic mounts before buying a metal, third-party mount, and never looked back. The two mounts that broke sent my GoPro careening down asphalt in each case, and I was lucky to both not lose it and to not have it be destroyed. So while the mounts are junk, the unit itself has proved to be very durable.

dylan604 9y ago

The saddest part of GoPro to me is that they own the Cineform codec. I love Cineform, and cried when GoPro acquired it. I liked it better than ProRes to be honest. Apple ProRes won because Apple. I worked for company (said company no longer exists) that was internally talking about purchasing Cineform way before GoPro, somewhere around 2008/09. However, this company was going to submit it for ISO standardization. It's a lovely codec, but it did not take off because it was always surrounded by questions of longevity. GoPro's purchase of it did not improve the longevity question, and made it seem Prosumer at best.

otsdr 9y ago
They have open sourced CineForm in October last year ( https://gopro.github.io/cineform-sdk/ https://gopro.github.io/cineform-sdk/ ); also, "SMPTE has standardized the CineForm codec as the SMPTE ST 2073 VC-5 video compression standard".

TaylorGood 9y ago

Gopro would’ve been a beautiful lifestyle business had they stayed private and only did cameras. The weight of scaling post-ICO sank them.

JBReefer 9y ago
Do you mean post IPO? Internet funbux should have nothing to do with GoPro - they sell a real product that actually has value.
- draw_down 9y ago
  Come on. It’s an easy enough typo to make.
- davidkuhta 9y ago
  Satoshian Slip
- asterius 9y ago
  The investors didn't want standard returns, the valuation was based on them growing rapidly for years, which means new markets. They could have made money from their drone product line by diversifying beyond 'toy'. But that would have required integration partners, different sales channels etc, and they didn't have the skills to build that.

yabol 9y ago

Any recommendation for alternative camera with good API?