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It’s happening again. GoPro has started shipping yet another range of new Hero 7 action cameras. The Hero 7 White, Hero 7 Silver and Hero 7 Black, respectively priced at £179, £279 and £379, will be the only ones sold by the company in the near future from now on, along with the year-old 360-degree spherical Fusion camera, priced at £559. The challenge for GoPro is deviously hard: can it’s simplified line-up of products save it from oblivion?
But first, the products. The high-end Hero 7 Black will feature GoPro’s own GP1 processor, which was designed in-house last year and already featured in the Hero 6 Black. Until then, most chips were produced by developer Ambarella, which also supplied DJI’s drones and Hikvision’s security cameras. Ultimately, this meant that GoPro had no particular competitive advantage over other companies in image processing – an issue the company hopes the GP1 will solve.
But the star of the show this year is a better built-in image stabilisation technology called Hypersmooth, to tackle choppy or unstable images. Again, the Hero 7 Black is the only device that gets Hypersmooth privilege, but the Silver and White should have similar levels of stabilisation to that of the Hero 6 Black.
The company is placing a lot of hope on this new launch, and with good reason. It’s no secret that GoPro has not been well in the past three years. Since 2015, it has been muddling around with year-on-year releases of different versions of the Hero camera leading to an overwhelming portfolio of products for its consumers. And the prices didn’t make much sense either. The Hero 6 Black, for instance, was priced at an extravagant $499.
The numbers have reflected GoPro’s shortcomings: last February, its share value had fallen by 75 per cent compared to 2014. It reported its first profitable quarter in two years during the summer of 2017, but hopeful prospects were soon discarded at the start of this year, as revenue was again down by seven per cent from the previous quarter.
That was probably due to a tough end to 2017. The company signed off the year by aborting its attempt to enter the drone market with the made-in-GoPro Karma – a fiasco project originally announced in 2015, and that saw all products being recalled shortly afterwards because a loose battery latch was causing the drones to fall out of the sky. After the embarrassment of having a 20-page long GoPro support thread called “WARNING: GoPro Karma falls out of the sky”, the company tried selling Karmas again in 2017, but had to give up in the face of tough competition. CEO Nick Woodman had predicted it would “enter 2018 with a bang”. Perhaps not the one he expected.
GoPro even hired JP Morgan at that point to seek help for a potential sale. Nine months later, as GoPro prepares to ship its new stocks of Hero 7 generation cameras, analysts at Oppenheimer upgraded the company’s stock price target by 30 per cent to $9. Summaries from the investment firm predict that the new products point towards a year of growth for the action camera company.
So what is it that makes the 2018 launch different from its predecessors? For senior analyst in emerging technologies Andrew Uerkwitz, the answer is straightforward: GoPro has simply, but finally, understood what its consumers want.
“They’ve understood the difference between you and I going to shoot with a GoPro, and a professional going to shoot with a GoPro,” he says. “The Hero 7 features automatic high dynamic range editing to fix our clumsy amateur footage, for example. Hopefully, when we take videos, they will immediately look far more professional than they used to.”
Previous versions would require dilettantes to spend six or seven hours editing their shots to make them look good, according to Uerkwitz. Enough to put off most of those who simply wanted quality videos of their summer holidays. This added on to the high price of the device, and to the fact that new models confusingly accumulated alongside older ones on store shelves - leading to customers having to choose between six or seven different types of camera. Casual users gave up on buying GoPros because, from all points of view, it was not a seamless experience.
With the Hero 7 series, the company is hoping to win back those casual users by providing the seamlessness it has been lacking. For this launch, all previous models have been taken off the market for customers to choose only between the three Hero 7 devices: low, mid and high-end. Thus targeting holiday-goers simply wishing to film a sunset, and who will most likely go for the cheaper Hero 7 White, all the way to a professional snowboarder recording double back-flips, who may choose the Hero 7 Black.
The challenge for GoPro is now to make sure that it provides high-quality footage while also being as user-friendly as possible. It is easy to see why, if it fails at either criteria, non-professional customers would be tempted to rely on their smartphone camera to record their experiences. For Uerkwitz, however, the latest series shows that the company is on the right track.
“They are trying to be a camera that you can just throw in your bag or pocket, pull out, push a button and get filming,” he says. “At the same time, the new GoPros have high stability features such as Hypersmooth and settings such as wide angle or fisheye that make them tools of quality.”
Part of GoPro’s renewed strategy consists of seeing itself as an extension to the smartphone, continues Uerkwitz, rather than a competitor, which historically has been the case. And this is where the company has moved. The new Hero 7 cameras have improved hardware, but crucially their software has also benefited from a revamp: the new user interface allows for live streaming and in-camera time-lapsing, for instance, and has simplified the process of sharing video content to social media.
Last May, GoPro announced a partnership with Instagram at Facebook’s F8 conference, that would let users share content from the GoPro app directly to their Instagram stories. The company is banking on the fact that social media is increasingly interested in story-driven content, which typically relies on video. What it is now offering is the possibility to produce higher quality video with a portable device directly connected to a smartphone to share instantly on social media.
But with the camera being the last battleground remaining in the smartphone wars for dominance in the sector, and consequently all manufacturers increasing the sophistication of their products with every new release, adding new features and the ability to record better and better video, in more and more extreme conditions, one has to wonder how long GoPro can stay ahead of the likes of Apple, Huawei, Sony and Samsung?
Indeed, GoPro may well still be needing the help of JP Morgan, or salvation may arrive in the form of Chinese electronic company Xiaomi, which has an interest in buying the company. One thing is certain, streamlining the hardware and cleaning up the UI is not going to cut it. Nor will positioning its action cameras as ancillary devices, rather than competitors, to smartphones. GoPro was on the right track with Karma, leveraging core skills to develop new hardware in complementary categories. The drone project may have crashed and burned, so retreating to tinker with established products is undeniably the safe thing to do – but to ensure survival long-term, GoPro needs to hold its nerve, go back to its roots and start innovating again.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
