Rumors have been talking about a GoPro drone for quite a while, and yesterday the company’s CEO Nick Woodman finally announced it is actually going to happen.
“Do you guys all want GoPro to make a quadcopter?” Woodman asked the audience at the Code Conference, replying “OK, GoPro is making a quadcopter. It’s official!”.
The device is expected to be launched in the first half of 2016, and is guaranteed to have have an impact on rivals’ sales.
“The quad is in some ways the ultimate GoPro accessory,” said Woodman, who would love to get his hands on a piece of the drone pie.
While he wouldn’t reveal the drone’s price, Woodman did mention that GoPro is a “consumer focused company” which would suggest that it will not be more expensive than its main competitors DJI and 3D Robotics.
Personally I wouldn’t be surprised if GoPro’s drone will be easier to use than other popular drones available today. This will allow the company to popularizer its new product, but also help it avoid being banned from the action-packed locations GoPro will be targeting.
Thanks to this move GoPro will not only profit from selling drones and the action cameras attached to them, it will also avoid getting left out of the action as competitors switch from GoPro-compatible gimbals to using their own built-in cameras.
Also, as any GoPro owner knows, the camera is often the cheap part. One of the reasons behinds the company’s huge popularity (and inflated bank account) is the endless variety of optional accessories one can buy, and believe you me, GoPro will have a bunch of drone-compatible accessories. In fact, Woodman has already confirmed that several related products will be available upon the drone’s 2016 launch.
We will be back with more info once any specs or capabilities of this new drone are announced.
Until then, which features would you like to see in the GoPro drone?
Here's Nick Woodman of @GoPro announcing the company is making a quadcopter. #CodeCon pic.twitter.com/YK1YDvktP6
— Recode (@Recode) May 28, 2015
UPDATE: The lead image has been changed. We slapped the GoPro logo on a DJI Phantom as an illustration, but it got people thinking GoPro were planning to do the same. :)
[via The Verge]
This would make me very happy :) but they are late to the market, so the’d better come up with something awesome.
I wanna finally see collision avoidance!
Battery life and portability. 20 minutes fly time for something you have to lug around for the rest of the day? Com’on … battery life would be a game changer.
“Mockup of a GoPro drone” Looks to me like a Phantom 2 with a GoPro logo photoshopped on it.