GoPro, the world's most iconic action camera, has been in very dire straits lately, with the company's stocks plunging drastically since peaking at $65 per share at summer's end last year. Over the next months, and as the company's new product the Hero 4 Session bombed with consumers, the once dominant action camera firm saw its shares fall more than 80 percent.
Earlier this year, GoPro even announced that its holiday sales fell well beneath analysts' expectations and that it would be cutting about 7 percent of its workforce as a result.
In an effort to get itself back in the game, GoPro CEO Nicholas Woodman announced on Monday that the company has made a very pertinent decision in order to address one of the main weaknesses of GoPro action cameras - video editing.
GoPro's tough, compact cameras have indeed become very popular. However, a lot of consumers have complained that the GoPro mobile app, which enables users to edit videos and publish them over the net, was extremely limited. Addressing this issue, Woodman said that the company had spent $105 million in cash in order to acquire Replay and Splice, two popular, efficient video editing apps for mobile devices. With the features and technology of the two video editors, GoPro is hoping that its users will find editing and uploading videos through their mobile devices much easier.
Designed by Paris-based Stupeflix, Replay works much like popular automatic video editor Magisto, automatically collating selected clips and photos into a complete video with effects, transitions and music. On the other hand, Splice, developed by Austin's Vemory, is a manual video editing tool which contains features commonly found in full-fledged video editors for the PC and Mac.
Though GoPro has disclosed the amount paid for the two companies, it did not state exactly how much was spent on each of the two video editors. Woodman further said that the two apps would be integrated into the native GoPro app, creating a video editor that is powerful, convenient to use, and most of all, fun.
"The Splice and Replay experiences will be incorporated and merged into the GoPro experience. For the consumer, in the future, it will be impossible to miss that this is a GoPro experience," he said.
