Archive for Action Sports

Hey, remember GoPros? You might have one sitting in a closet or a drawer somewhere. Perhaps some well-meaning friend or family member got you one as a gift thanks to a great Black Friday deal, or you did the same for someone on your gift list. I have one. I can see it right now from where I’m sitting. It has footage of golf and curling and probably my dogs on it, but I wouldn’t know. To know, I’d have to unload the video files off the SD card onto my computer. And then what would I do with it? Shove it onto a hard drive somewhere? Back it up to the cloud where it will live a sad and lonely existence? Put it on YouTube? Much like the footage I’ve shot with my camera, GoPro is being left for dead.

Herein lies the problem with GoPro. It’s a great piece of hardware that provides output of limited value. It’s like if Gutenberg invented the printing press, but it was only capable of producing copies of Fifty Shades of Grey. A GoPro is one of things that seems like a good idea when you get it, like a wok or a pair of snowshoes. Any maybe you do use it for a time, but the novelty eventually wears off. It’s not GoPro’s fault. Its draw is the same as a wok or some snowshoes — GoPro isn’t just selling a product, it’s selling the idea of what your life could be like with that product. I’m gonna get my snowboard out of the garage and hook this thing up to it! I’m gonna strap this to my bike helmet and finally try navigating those trails! This is some Don Draper-level stuff. And then, like so many things in life, our hobbies of fantasy are put on the shelf. And the sales drop off. And that’s where GoPro sits. On your shelf, and on the sales lists of investors.

Sure, some people use GoPros for legitimate and genuinely great stuff. Some use them in very creative and engaging ways. And those people are really the core market of GoPro. But that market is niche and limited. The rest of use schlubs barely use the things. Even if we do, the cameras are so durable that we hardly have a need to replace or upgrade the models we currently own. GoPro has become a victim of its own success, it seems. And this is why the market is so bearish on them. GoPro might have hit its maximum saturation already. Throw in a new lawsuit and things start to get even more dicey.

But we should not mourn GoPro just yet. They have one very important thing going for them right now — they make really solid products. Startups are a dime a dozen these days, but one thing remains true; hardware is hard. With all due respect to software developers — seriously, many of them do amazing things — an app or a website can be set up with, all things considered, somewhat-minimal investment. A few laptops and a server instance can lead to great things in software. Hardware, on the other hand, takes a good deal more capital. There’s R&D. There’s prototyping. There’s contracts to be hashed out with manufacturers overseas and quality control and component sourcing. So when a company can break through all those barriers and produce a quality product, it’s a big deal. GoPro has already done that. They’re just having a hard time convincing the market to buy more of them. All the legit and wannabe thrill seekers have already procured GoPro cameras. GoPro needs a new gig, a new way to inject themselves into our lives. That’s where another company with deep pockets can come in and utilize the superior hardware into a new application.

So, who has the resources and possible need for such a thing? Here are a few ideas.

It should go without saying, but this is pure speculation on the author’s part and does not constitute advanced knowledge of the situation nor investment advice.

Google

This one seems like cheating since Google has enough money to acquire almost any company, but there could be a fit. Since Google spun off into a subsidiary of Alphabet, it’s clear that they’re not just in the search/advertising game any more. They are branching out. They already have a hardware company under their umbrella in Nest, and they own the biggest platform for GoPro content in the form of YouTube. Perhaps Google can package the cameras with a free software suite that allows GoPro footage uploads to be faster and easier. Maybe footage shot with GoPros can hit higher in the search ranks or be featured in promoted content. Could Google figure out a good solution to actually use a GoPro as a webcam? They have the engineering talent. Maybe selling these cameras as the all-in-one solution to create user content is how it comes into the hands of consumers again. And don’t forget that Google and GoPro have already collaborated on a new rig that will allow 360-degree filming for VR purposes.

Facebook/Oculus

Facebook made a big and somewhat unexpected splash when it entered the hardware market by acquiring Oculus. Oculus may be best known for making VR gaming hardware and software, but there is no reason it can’t get into the content-producing game. Much like the Google offering, Oculus could concoct a filming rig to produce content for their upcoming headsets, making it easier (and perhaps cheaper) for creators to create a VR environment. Why stop at gaming when the future of news and entertainment could hinge on the VR world?

Some other camera company

The analog company Fossil just got into the wearables game when it acquired Misfit. What’s to say an old-school camera company can’t make a similar push into the video field with GoPro? Canon and Nikon already are neck deep in the digital photography and video world. There are good reasons for bringing GoPro into the fold, either to bring the durable cameras into their product line or integrate GoPro tech to make SLR cameras more feature-rich. A hyper-durable SLR that can shoot HD video with the push of a button? Not a bad market to get into.

Samsung

Samsung has been trying to introduce their own ecosystem to rival Apple’s with limited success. They have their own VR division, of course, and everything they make seems to tie into the Galaxy family of products. If they could offer a piece of dedicated hardware that paired with both the consumption and production of VR content and have it specifically tie into the Galaxy line of products, they could bring another bargaining chip to the table when trying to covert iPhone users. Yeah, the iPhone camera might be good, but check out what you can make when you pair a Galaxy GoPro with a a Galaxy phone! Samsung has the capital and engineering chops to make a partnership like this work, if they chose to.

I don’t see the GoPro going extinct any time soon. I do see it becoming a product offering for another company, however. GoPro did all the heavy lifting here. It made the rock-solid product that’s easy and fun to use. They just need a little help from another entity to make a better use case for their cameras. It may be one of the companies mentioned above, it could be another entirely. But hardware is still hard. When an outlier like GoPro comes along, it doesn’t die a quick death. Like their cameras, GoPro can take a beating and still end up in great shape. Exactly who ends up with the final say in that shape they will take remains to be seen.

The GoPro camera can be used for recording virtually anything, but the original market for the small waterproof shooter was for action sports. GoPro gave surfers, skateboarders, skiers, bikers, bungee jumpers, and all kinds of extreme athletes the ability to easily record (and share) unique views of their sport. Now, we mount them on our cars and our dogs. I mount mine on my golf bag to record driving range sessions. You can find GoPro footage of nearly anything these days, and GoPro is looking to turn the best footage out there into cash for them and the creator.

The newly-launched Premium Content Licensing Portal is GoPro’s take on the Getty licensing model. Essentially, GoPro is selling a service to ad producers, movie makers, journalistic organizations, or anyone else with enough money that will allow them to buy the rights to interesting footage shot on GoPro cameras. The companies pay GoPro, GoPro pays the video makers. It seems like a no-brainer for content producers. As Mashable puts it:

… high-quality original footage is costly and difficult to produce, so advertisers are more than willing to shell out the money to buy licenses. Thanks to the durability of the devices and savvy ties with extreme sporting, GoPro users have created a wealth of first-person action footage that’s hard to get otherwise.

While, at least at the moment, it seems unlikely that GoPro users could use the service as a full-time job, it seems like getting offered some cash for their cool videos would be a win for them, as well. Everyone likes a little extra money, and they’d also get the thrill of possibly seeing their footage on TV or the web. They’re going to do parkour on high buildings or surf giant waves anyway — might as well make a little money off it.

The new service is also an interesting fork in the business model for GoPro. They’ve made a lot of money on their cameras and accessories, and the company is valued at almost $4 billion. But we’re seeing more and more that creating cool hardware isn’t enough. Look at Apple. They’ve sold unseemly amounts of their devices, but as the iterations offer fewer and fewer new features, customers become reluctant to pay for upgrades. The jump from the original iPhone to the iPhone 3GS was huge — much bigger than the jump from the iPhone 5 to the iPhone 6. Apple caught this early, and that’s where the App Store came in. It’s another revenue model built on the backbone of their successful hardware. GoPros are built to last. It’s one of their main selling points, but could also mean a longer window of time between repeat sales. If the hardware market gets too saturated, they have to turn elsewhere for revenue. Now a hardware company is also a media company. It’s not a pivot, it’s diversification.

The site is already up and running, so we may very well see more GoPro footage in our TV and online streaming ads. And since GoPro is acting as the gatekeeper for what’s interesting and engaging, chances are good that the footage we see will be the cream of the crop. It’s a smart move for GoPro. They make a little extra money, and might even convince buyers on the fence to pick up one of their cameras. Whether it works or not, the move shows that GoPro is looking to get ahead of the curve, rather than waiting for camera sales to drop before trying to play catchup.

(Image via chriscom)

The first thing to keep in mind about Blast Motion’s sensor is that it’s not just designed for baseball. Yes, like the Diamond Kinetics SwingTracker, you can attach the sensor to the end of a bat to track swing speed and direction. And like the Zepp sensor, the Blast sensor can also be used to track a golf swing. But Blast’s approach revolved around designing a high-quality, general purpose sensor, and then building specific applications for baseball, basketball, golf, action sports, and athletic performance around it.

“We didn’t approach this as trying to design a swing sensor or a specific sport product,” senior director of marketing Donovan Prostrollo said. “What we designed it to do was to be a natural motion capture product, and then we applied that to different sports, so it doesn’t pigeonhole our product.”

At the heart of the Blast sensor are inertial measurement units (IMUs), the combination of accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetometers that have become ubiquitous in devices like smartphones and tablets. But Blast has made two improvements to make the device more accurate. First, Blast Motion uses multiple IMU chips (although they wouldn’t disclose how many) to capture a wider range of movements. Second, the Blast sensor was also designed to use what founder Mike Bentley referred to as “tactical-grade” technology, a combination of more precise sensors, more processing power, and on-the-fly calibration that improves the device’s accuracy and consistency from one movement to the next.

But despite the intense technological focus, both Bentley and Prostrollo stressed the importance of keeping their outputs simple for the end user.

“You’ll find other solutions out there really overwhelm users with numbers, which is both good and bad, because if users don’t know which number to focus on, you’re not really helping them, you’re actually potentially making it worse,” Prostrollo said.

“At the end of the day, [the athletes] would love the technology to just completely disappear,” Bentley added. “And that’s one of the goals of Blast is how do we make the device disappear.”

When compared to other bat sensor apps, Blast lacks the three-dimensional rendering of the swing. Instead, the Blast app revolves around video, typically captured by setting the device on a tripod and automatically clipped so that only the events of interest are included. Prostrollo argued that the focus on video gave Blast an edge in capturing the entire movement, not just key metrics.

“We decided from the beginning to capture video and do it natively as part of the app so it’s really integrated into our DNA,” Prostrollo said. “And the cool thing about that is when you pair video and you compare the level of consistency out of our product it really does an amazing job.”

And Blast recently announced an adaptive slow-motion feature that adjusts the playback speed around the event.

“Basically, we know exactly when the impact occurred, when the swing started, and when the swing ended, and based on that we can speed up and slow down the video,” Prostrollo said. “We can also take the metrics and overlay them on top to get this dynamic fill, so it’s not just a metric in isolation.”

Blast verified the accuracy of its metrics using motion capture systems. As an example, Prostrollo said the system was within 1 mph of the motion capture system “85 percent of the time” and Bentley claimed that the Blast system “outperforms our optical system when you talk about rotational velocity” as verified by higher-end devices more commonly used to test aeronautical and military-grade IMUs.

Bentley and Prostrollo stressed not only the device’s accuracy but also the device’s consistency, so that identical swings or jumps would produce identical sensor readings. They attributed this consistency to improvements in their manufacturing process, and claimed it made a big difference to the professional athletes they collaborated with.

“The challenge is pro athletes absolutely can recognize that day one, the amateur athletes won’t necessarily realize that a product’s not as accurate as they want until it’s too late: they’ve purchased it, they’ve gone out, they’ve tried it, and they wonder why their swing speed varies by 6 mph when it’s all the same,” Prostrollo said.

Despite being a relatively new company, the founders of Blast Motion have been in the inertial sensor business for a quarter of a century. Before entering the sports world, their focus included military and medical products.

“This is not the first sensor we’ve ever manufactured,” Bentley said. “When we originally designed the sensors, it wasn’t for a single application. We wanted to be able to use the sensor and cross-pollinate across all applications.”

As Blast Motion began adapting its offerings for new markets, it worked with coaches, professionals, and other subject matter experts to design useful applications. But Bentley said there was a lot of overlap between the biomechanical elements underlying the different sports. Even more surprising, he said, was the overlap between social circles across different sports.

“What’s pretty unique about when you do get into the inertial world of working with different professional teams, how many baseball players work with professional golfers, and how many golfers play with hockey players,” Bentley said. “So the world is pretty small, and when you get a pretty exciting product, the word travels pretty fast in those worlds.”

The company currently works with a number of action sports ambassadors including Mike “Hucker” Clark and Greg Lutzka, as well as some NBA and MLB players they declined to name, citing confidentiality. And Blast Motion is working closely with bat manufacturer Easton as it gears up to release the Easton Power Sensor this summer. Little information is currently available about the project, but judging from the screenshots in the iTunes App Store, the interface at least will be very similar to Blast’s Baseball Replay app.

Looking to the future, Prostrollo said the biggest change would be not on the technological side but rather on the adoption side, as wearable sensors like Blast become more and more ubiquitous among both amateurs and pros.

“We’re at the point now where the average consumer has access to this technology, it’s no longer the pro athlete,” Prostrollo said. “What you’re going to see is a whole new generation of athletes leveraging the data and the technology, having a history to go back on, and really be able to do something very meaningful and different with that.”

I do this weird thing where I take a GoPro on the golf course. It’s not because I love doing trick shots or utilizing bunkers as launch ramps for my golf cart — it’s because I want to look at my swing. One of my biggest issues this season is transferring success on the range to success on the course. I record portions of my practice sessions, but didn’t have anything with which to compare those recordings. So I now take my GoPro out on the course and record a few shots here and there to see how they compare with my technique on the range. It’s dorky, I know.

And while I like walking a course when I’m by myself, I’ll take a cart if I’m with a group. I don’t get as much exercise, but I’m not slowing everyone else down. The cart makes for an excellent GoPro tripod (quadpod?) so I’ll just clip the camera on there and let the recording roll. When I go through the footage, there’s a bunch where the cart is just rolling along. Some of it is boring, but sometimes the camera catches an interesting view or a pretty sunset as we’re meandering down the fairway. I always think this would be cool footage to share, but, well, it’s so dang long. Unless the viewer has some sort of ASMR reaction to video of fairways and sounds of the wind, no one is going to sit through the whole thing.

I imagine that those who participate in real action sports — you know, the people GoPros are intended for — feel the same way. Footage of downhill skiing can be cool, but it can also be quite long and tedious. Microsoft is working on technology that would help alleviate this situation by shortening and smoothing action video.

The software is called Hyperlapse, which conspicuously shares its name with a similar solution from Instagram. Microsoft takes the technology a little further, however. While Instagram’s Hyperlapse will simply just cut out frames to produce a time lapse, Microsoft’s version will pick out the smoothest and most important frames. According to Engadget:

In the mobile version of the app, instead of speeding up the footage by only keeping every tenth frame (for example) Hyperlapse only preserves frames that appear to visually follow the camera’s estimated path through the landscape. By removing wild card frames with sudden jerks or movements, the sped-up footage ends up being automatically smoothed and stabilized. As a result, the faster you decide to speed up your video, up to 32X, the more watchable the results will be.

Hyperlapse comes in two flavors; a mobile app for Android and Windows Phone, and software for PC. No word yet on iOS compatibility, but given Microsoft’s recent push to embrace the platform, I imagine one is coming soon. The PC version is currently a preview version of professional software, so expect that to cost some kind of money at some point in time. The PC version is the most obvious choice to edit footage from a standalone camera like a GoPro, but GoPro’s app does allow exporting to phones which could theoretically be imported into Hyperlapse. A Dropbox/Google Drive option could work as well, perhaps. You can see how well the software translates what would be puke-inducing time lapse video into something much more watchable.

A lot of action footage videos are a lot like vacation photos — they help you remember great times you had, but no one else really wants to see them. By giving us an easy way to edit and smooth this footage out, Microsoft is helping to create more dynamic and engaging material for us to email or post to YouTube. I’m not 100% sure it will help make my golf footage interesting, but I’ll still probably give it a try. I just finished a round on one of the hilliest courses I ever played. Perhaps that will make for some interesting footage when put through Hyperlapse. If not, it will still be more interesting than the source material. And certainly more impressive than my score that day.

On top of the obvious ill-effects of traumatic brain injuries, we can add class-action lawsuits to the list. The Illinois High School Association is facing a lawsuit of their own, one also involving concussions, and a legal suit they’ve been involved in since November of last year. The suit against a high school organization is the first of its kind, as previously only collegiate and professional football have been faced with legal action. Where the National Football League will soon be forced to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to former players due to long-term concussion effects, not every governing body or football organization is capable of doing so.

Via the Chicago Tribune, word broke the IHSA filed their first response to the lawsuit, hoping the suit will be dismissed, calling it “a misguided effort that threatens high school football.” The lawsuit does not seek any monetary compensation to previous victims, but rather one to force better prevention and immediate medical care for both games and practices. The closest thing money chasing in the suit is the plaintiff including a provision within the suit for the IHSA to pay for medical testing of previous high school football players going to back to 2002. The suit doesn’t make demands such as the Mayo Clinic recommended CT scan, just to take action in both prevention and treatment. Even if it something as basic as the NFL’s sideline Baseline Test, action is clearly required.

Centered around the IHSA’s desire to see the suit thrown out is the cost of the medical staff and testing. IHSA Director Marty Hickman believes the cost would hurt the less-well off schools in the state, and was quoted saying the sport would turn into “haves and have nots.” Another argument on behalf of the IHSA is in their words within the response “would be unwieldy.” The response goes to to say “If a high school … fails to have a court-ordered medical professional at a football practice, how will such a violation of the Court’s injunction be remedied? Sanction the IHSA? The local school board? The principal? The athletic director? The coaches? All of the above?”

Perhaps no argument is lazier than the “slippery slope” that the IHSA is bringing to the table. The good news is they aren’t claiming or feigning ignorance on the matter of concussions, just crying poor. While showing any semblance of favoritism towards a particular sport isn’t ideal either — someone can get a concussion on the track, the volleyball court, etc. — this suit is particular in its desire to see better attention in the football realm. The IHSA reports having an annual budget of $10 million for over 40 sports and activities across all levels of high schools and claim court mandated would essentially break the bank. For an organization with a television broadcast deal with Comcast/CSN Chicago, the lack of available funds seems to be a weak defense. If the money truly isn’t available for additional medical staff or improved helmets, perhaps a better mouth guard, one already partnered with multiple collegiate teams, is the first step in the right direction. The first hearing is set for 10 days from now.

(Header image via IHSA)

Various devices boast about toughness, water resistance and qualities of similar ilk. As Amazon’s most recent Fire commercial demonstrates, a device’s overall ability to work under circumstances — extreme and every day — remain important bullet points. Sony is willing to put its money where its mouth is, as they partnered up with the Tough Mudder (TM) organization to record and track various events this year. The devices being used will be Sony’s Xperia Z3, Z3 tablet compact and Smartwatch 3.

From the Samsung S4 and S4 Active in 2013 and their S5 last year to the Kyocera Brigadier and HTC Desire Eye, water resistance in mobile devices is nothing new. HTC offers Uh-Oh Protection, where events such as cracked screens and water damage are covered up to one year after purchase. Similarly there is no shortage of water and sweat resistant smartwatches or fitness trackers, though again, few have been put through the paces of an event like the Tough Mudder. In addition to various participants utilizing the Sony gear, a sponsored team will also be running the course while being subject to all manners of dirt, water, dust and any combination of the three.

According to the Tough Mudder website, 1.3 million people have participated in various events over the years and each race averages between 10 and 15 thousand people. The advertising reach for Sony shouldn’t be understated, but that is presuming their devices work as advertised. Sony claims each of the three are IP 68 certified, meaning they can submerged in nearly five feet of fresh — not salt — water for up to 30 minutes without any negative effects. With multiple TM events involving water, such as the Mud Mile and the Underwater Tunnels, Sony is betting that this publicity and their sponsorship paint the company in good light. Samsung faced public backlash when it was discovered in 2013 that the S4 and S4 Active did not have moisture damage covered in the one-year limited warranty despite being so famously advertised by having a camera mode specifically for taking pictures underwater. The next Tough Mudder event is scheduled for this coming weekend in Los Angeles with five more races throughout the year. It’s only a matter of time before Sony’s products get put through the wringer, just like the people who run in the events.

(Header image via Facebook)

The drones are coming. Maybe. Someday. I hope. Fox Sports tested flying cameras in a high-flying sport over the weekend as it used drones to capture video during the AMA Supercross Series broadcast at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, IN. According to USA Today, Fox will utilize drones in upcoming golf coverage, as well.

“If we can track a motorbike doing 30-40 mph, we can track anything in sport,” Brad Cheney, director of technical operations at Fox Sports, told USA Today. “We can certainly track a wide receiver only doing 19 mph.”

HeliVideo, a company based in Austin, Texas approved by the Federal Aviation Administration, developed the eight-propeller drones used during the test run. Each unit costs $25,000. While ESPN used drones in limited action during the X Games, it’s believed this is the first use indoors. Monster Energy, the named sponsor of the motocross event, published the below video on YouTube Saturday as licensed pilots flew three drones during a simulated race.

While this is a positive step towards the use of drones in telecasts of the big three sports, the USA Today reported “it took layers of approval from lawyers and risk management types” to pull off this coverage, so imagine the bureaucratic headaches involved with securing permission from say, the National Football League.

Leagues aim to protect themselves from injuries to players, or even worse, fans. But come on, corporate suits. These are *licensed* pilots. How could you not trust one?

Awful Announcing reasonably estimates, based on the USA Today report, that live play telecasts will include drones within the next three years. But why do we have to wait that long? The technology is here today. Take a year, test the use of these drones on practice fields, Little League games or studio back lots during staff pick-up games. How about bringing some publicity to attention-starved sports like AVP Beach Volleyball or Major League Kickball ? I’m pretty sure Bradley Woodrum’s softball team will sign any and all releases put in front of them for a 24-pack and a new team bat.

Drones would make the wire-supported camera, limited in its use and documented to be dangerous, obsolete. A Fox Sports cable camera broke and injured ten fans in the stands during in 2013 during a Spring Cup Series at Charlotte Motor Speedway and damaged several cars, some severely, that were traveling at 195 mph.

It’s an obvious next step in sports broadcasting, and it’s frustrating that the tech, which is ready now, has developed faster than the heads of broadcast companies and the hand-cuffing legalese that bind the hands of network story tellers.

Since we last visited with startup i1 Biometrics, developers of the Vector mouth guard which measures the level and location of each hit on the football field, the demand and the market for their product has grown significantly. Yesterday i1 announced a new partnership with Texas A&M football. Already partnered with the University of Kansas, Louisiana State University as well as the University of South Carolina, i1 Biometrics is making strides to measure potentially concussion inducing levels of impacts.

The Vector mouth guard itself measures rotational and linear impacts and then sends the impact data in real time to to the coaching and training staff where it is stored in their cloud computing for easy access. Notifications can be sent to mobile devices for immediacy or the information gleaned from the mouth guards may be accessed online through a phone or computer.

In a joint study between Harvard University and Boston University last year covering 734 NCAA football players from the 2013 season, the concussion numbers are jarring, and not just the speed of the impacts. The players claimed six potential concussions and 21 “dings” for each confirmed concussion.

Given what is already known about the long-term effects of concussions — and even more alarming is what is unknown — seeing front-line collegiate football teams taking things more seriously is a step in the right direction.

Shares of GoPro sank 12 percent Tuesday following news that the US Patent and Trademark Office granted Apple a patent for a remote-controlled, mountable camera, Bloomberg reported. The stock closed Tuesday at $49.87, and while it rebounded slightly Wednesday ($52.34 at closing), it wasn’t enough to quell investor concerns that GoPro could face its stiffest competition yet.

“Investors are concerned that the patent will let Apple, the world’s largest company by market valuation, make products that are similar to what GoPro offers,” said Charlie Anderson, an investment bank and brokerage analyst at Dougherty & Co., to Bloomberg’s Peter Burrows.

Patently Apple monitors Apple’s patent filings and acknowledges that many patents don’t amount to an actual product on the market. However, they found an interesting nugget that makes this seem Apple has a real investment in entering the sports camera market.

What’s interesting here is that Apple’s invention that was filed in 2012 appears to now incorporate intellectual property from Kodak that they acquired back in November 2013. In one implementation, Apple’s invention could directly move into GoPro’s territory as the patent specifically mentions the weaknesses of the GoPro devices.

If Apple acquired a specific Kodak patent to bolster their granted invention, it would appear to be one Apple is taking very seriously. Why else purchase a patent if you’re going to just shelf the idea[?] Exactly which part of the technology Apple is interested in […] isn’t known at this time.

And really, this patent may not be for sports cameras. Maybe it’s related to the iWatch. Or some other Apple product we have no idea about.

Alex Gauna, an analyst for JMP Securities, isn’t concerned by the patent.

“It does not seem to me that launching an action camera accessory is the most logical product extension for Apple to pursue right now,” Gauna told Reuters.

However, details within the patent, such as the following, lend to the idea that Apple has the power to put a dent in the sports camera market if it wants to. And that’s enough to spook investors.

In some embodiments, the microphone is capable of recording sounds in air and also in an underwater environment when the digital camera is used to record underwater images. In other embodiments, the digital camera includes both a conventional air microphone as well as an underwater microphone (hydrophone) capable of recording underwater sounds.

Apple notes in the patent that the camera could be secured to an object, like handle bars, a helmet or a surfboard. Additionally, the system lets users control the camera remotely, which GoPro offers through an app.

Let’s not kid ourselves, GoPro is a beast. Anderson said that the company earned $1 billion in revenue last year. Along with the lion’s share of the sports camera market, GoPro has the buzz and brand name awareness that most companies envy.

But this is Apple we’re talking about. Describing the company’s faithful as a powerful consumer base is like saying Michael Jordan was pretty good at basketball. And with its history of designing stylish products, sports camera shoppers could very well be swayed by a brand name that squashes GoPro and buy a more creative, cooler-looking camera.

(Image via Andreas Kambanis)

GoPro cameras certainly revolutionized the way we capture sports footage — offering a new, first-person perspective with their mountable waterproof cameras. But with mounted and handheld camera footage comes quite a bit of shakiness. Tiffen, a company that specializes in counterweighted camera mounts, has released a product specifically designed for GoPro cameras to offer smooth handheld footage.

The Steadicam uses hinges and weights to reduce the vibration and quick jolts in GoPro footage. It’s a technology that have been available to professional photographers for a while, and now anyone with a GoPro can make those silky smooth Hollywood-like roving shots to spice up their YouTube channels.

Steadicam Curve from The Tiffen Company on Vimeo.