Let’s start off with some basic questions surrounding GoPro cameras:
Are they cool? Yes.
Are they relatively cheap? Yes.
Am I an extreme athlete? No.
Do I use it enough to consistently upgrade? No.
The first GoPro I purchased was the Hero 2 Outdoor Edition. I used it for surfing, snowboarding, golfing and high stakes poker games. The thing is, I don’t surf or snowboard very often, and even when I do, the videos suck because I don’t do double backflips or ride the barrels and get pitted. If I want to watch golf reruns I’ll watch the 1997 Masters. If I want to watch high stakes poker I’ll watch the World Series of Poker on ESPN. Re-watching all of the videos I took is worse than watching amateur porn.
Not only does my GoPro collect dust most of the year, it also takes up massive amounts of storage. You basically have to purchase an external hard drive or get extra cloud storage to save your videos. A couple of sessions of recording in 4k and you are looking at over 25Gb of data. Most people don’t even have that much storage on their iPhone.
The thing I hated about the Hero 2 was that it didn’t have a wifi connection, LCD display to see the pictures or videos, and it consistently froze.
My chick recently won a free Hero 4 Black Edition which shoots in 4k. It was definitely an upgrade over the Hero 2 but it still doesn’t make me a better athlete. It still collects as much dust as my first one.
Yesterday morning GoPro announced they were releasing a drone. The stock popped 11.5% but is still down 73% from its 52 week high set only a few months ago. The drone is a good idea to expand their markets and keep the innovation flowing but it still doesn’t get me excited that much. 99.99% of us are not extreme athletes that need a GoPro camera or a drone to record our lives. You sit at your desks all day staring at a computer screen waiting for me to ramp the close. Your lives are boring and no one wants to see your shitty GoPro movies.
This morning Citi lowered their price target on $GPRO from 75 to 22 #nailedit. Like them, I expect demand to remain soft as this fad plays out and other competitors fight for market share.
GoPro is the Eastman Kodak for Millennials. Their best case scenario is that they get bought out before they go bankrupt. It’s a camera on a shtick.
hysterical & I like the analysis
Sums things up perfectly. Easy come, easy go.