GoPro’s founder and CEO, Nick Woodman has been on something of a press tour, talking up the new line of products the company has recently announced. These include the Hero5 Black (US$399) and the smaller Hero5 Session (US$299), both of which were released on Sunday.
The Quik App /GoPro
Speaking to CNBC News on Monday, Woodman focused in particular on GoPro’s new cloud service, GoPro Plus. The service will allow GoPro Hero users to upload and store their content online as well as use GoPro’s Quik app to make speedy auto-edits.
GoPro Plus became available in the U. S over the weekend at the price of US$4. 99 per month and is due to open up to other markets next year. By providing the means to record, store, edit, and share material, Woodman called the company "an end-to-end storytelling solution. "
"GoPro Plus and the Hero5 lineup finally make it easy for our customers to go out and capture their life, and when they come and plug their Hero5 in to charge, it can automatically offload their photos and videos to the cloud," Woodman said.
During his talk with CNBC, Woodman was unfortunately unable to avoid the elephant in the room – DJI. Within days of GoPro’s Karma drone announcement in September, DJI announced their own compact drone, the Mavic, putting a dampener on GoPro’s surge in popularity.
When CNBC’s team brought up the upcoming release of the Mavic, they they enquired if GoPro would be open to collaboration with the Chinese company over drones. The awkward subtext of this question perhaps being the conceit that Karma may not be able to win this fight outright, especially in foreign markets.
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Woodman answered with a confident response, saying that they see a “strong vision for our future in drones and frankly, beyond drones. ” He sold the Karma’s versatility arguing that “aerial perspectives are just one part of great storytelling” and that the ability of Karma’s detachable gimbal provided it with additional filming possibilities on the ground.
Unfortunately, Woodman also admitted in his response that members of his team “. . . actually use the handgrip more than the drone. ” Though he managed to recover somewhat (explaining that there are heavy restrictions on where you can fly a drone) it probably wasn’t the best idea to downplay the drone’s usefulness when you’re in direct competition with a specialist drone manufacturer who has your new product against the ropes.
Though his statements were generally big on hype and low on detail, Woodman said to CNBC, that GoPro still had "a lot more innovation" to come.
Karma /GoPro
. digitalrev.com2016-10-7 03:00