GoPro’s Hero line used to be quite the innovative product, and the company was responsible for some significant advanced in action cameras on the consumer market. However, while the company’s name became the “default identifier” for action cameras, much like Xerox was for copy machines, they were quickly overtaken by their competitors in various regards. In a rapidly evolving market like that for action cameras, there is little room for mistakes, and the GoPro Hero 5 really needs to offer a good set of features to draw people back to the GoPro brand.
There are various rumors about the upcoming new installment in the line, but pretty much none of them have any serious foundations. At the same time, people have been discussing the GoPro Hero 5 on messaging boards, expressing their desires for various features to be introduced to the next device. If GoPro are out of ideas, they just need to take a look at a popular tech forum and will quickly get all sorts of suggestions.
Among the many suggestions that keep popping up, two that get brought up often are both rooted in social media. It looks like plenty of people would be interested in seeing 3D streaming in the device, as well as some sort of live streaming functionality. In fact, the former is already rumored to be part of the feature set for the GoPro Hero 5, but there are no concrete details about it. 3D video is still a relatively new technology, and there are multiple ways to go about implementing it.
GoPro don’t even have to follow the steps of other companies in their approach to this problem, and they can think about a more original way to take a 3D video. One of the main concerns they would have to address is the use of the device’s battery, as this is definitely going to suffer from the introduction of additional cameras.
On the other hand, live streaming would definitely be a great feature to have and will add a lot to the popularity of the device, but GoPro would have to put some serious work into the connectivity capabilities of the model before approaching that. There have been various discussions about the performance of the connectivity features of previous models, and for live streaming to work well, the device would have to maintain a stable, constant connection without any interruptions.
The two could also be combined, something which would surely draw many people to the next GoPro, and we could even see it used actively in sports events and similar scenarios. With some clever marketing, this could become a hit trend over the next few years, and GoPro could once again find themselves leading the new wave on the market. The company still enjoys good popularity among their fans, so they should have no problem finding strong support for their next release.
Last but not least, there are also lots of people talking about the need for a new, better battery. This will become especially true if the device comes with the various kinds of extra features we mentioned above, which would require a lot more power to get similar usage times as we currently have. Other models on the market have started to really raise the bar in this regard, so GoPro should definitely invest in some more research on this side of things if they want to make a solid impression.