Updated on September 20, 2016: We added additional product info not mentioned in our original article, as well as first-impressions. We also added comments made by GoPro founder and CEO Nick Woodman.
GoPro made its biggest product announcement to date on September 19, with the reveal of the highly anticipated Karma drone and the next-generation of the Hero camera, the Hero5. The company is also introducing a cloud-based subscription service, new accessories, and the desktop version of its Quik mobile app.
Connecting all the products and services is a new focus on giving users an “end-to-end storytelling” situation – from the hardware to capture the content and the software to edit and share. It’s one way the company is differentiating itself from lower-priced competitors that claim to offer products similar to GoPro’s.
“We want to help you become great storytellers,” said GoPro founder and CEO, Nick Woodman, during the company’s launch event in Squaw Valley, California (we were invited guests of GoPro, but all opinion is our own).
In a Q&A session, Woodman elaborated on what GoPro strives to be with its products and services, and that it’s more than just a consumer electronics company.
“The ‘action’ part of what we enabled is just a subset of the GoPro equation,” Woodman said, in reference to the action cam category that GoPro, arguably, created. “GoPro is more than action. People don’t buy GoPro for the hardware, but for the cool stories and experiences that it enables. GoPro is this experience sharing company. It just happens our products have electronics in them.”
As for the competition, “I don’t think anyone is close to us in hardware, and I don’t think anyone is in the same universe when it comes to stories,” Woodman said.
While it’s easy dismiss Woodman’s words as marketing (even he commented on that), he said GoPro’s employees truly believe in the products and what they do. He also acknowledged the missteps GoPro made in flooding the market with too many products, and the Karma’s delay.
“It’s not easy to develop products like this,” Woodman said. “It took time to build the team we got. We had to lose a bit of face, but we don’t want to sell customers something that doesn’t exceed their expectations.”
With that, here’s a quick look at the new products.
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