Popular Mechanics (South Africa)
This changed everything:
How GoPro sparked a DIY video movement.
BEFORE YOUTUBE, if you wanted to replace a balky starter motor in your Hyundai Elantra, you had to find a copy of a Haynes manual and puzzle out the repair yourself from instructions and exploded diagrams. If you needed to run an electrical circuit in your home, you turned to Renovation. Now we consult the omnipresent video-sharing platform, where home-made bits of footage show us how to tackle almost any project. Often those videos were possibly shot with or made by a little camera called the GoPro.
Before its creation, there was no easy way to shoot, edit and share videos. To do that, you’d need a major production studio.
YouTuber Scotty Kilmer remembers the change clearly. The celebrity mechanic went from hosting the Crank It Up car-repair show on CBS, with $150 000 cameras, pro lighting, and ‘all that horsesh*t’, to starting his own YouTube channel in 2007. He’s since racked up 3.6 million subscribers. To do it, all he needed was a laptop with some editing software and a small selection of affordable consumer digital cameras. Among them: a GoPro, with its remarkable (for the time) wide-angle lens, which was especially useful for getting shots inside tight spaces.
Compared to modern versions of the GoPro, the original in 2004 was a chunky plastic brick in a waterproof case. The whole thing cost just $20. It didn’t even shoot digital images. Instead, it used 35 mm film.
‘The first GoPro was really just a wrist camera to capture my friends surfing,’ said Nick Woodman, its inventor, in 2014. It was, as he called it, ‘the original selfie’ camera. Two years after its debut, the GoPro went digital and shot to popularity on the back of athletes who spread both the selfie-style- and POV shots that are now ubiquitous in the DIY video community.
GoPro’s early adoption of new tech was essential to its growth. The first digital version (2006) recorded 10-second VGA clips, without sound, to 32 MB of internal flash memory. By contrast, the first iPhone didn’t hit stores until 2007, and its video capability didn’t come until 2009’s 3GS. Most important, GoPro’s wide field of view, easy controls and autofocus, and broad ISO range that adapted to all kinds of lighting conditions made capturing video easy.
The other key catalyst was YouTube, launched in 2005 just after the first Hero – without it, GoPro never would have seen such widespread adoption. For five years, as YouTube exploded and creators flooded the site with content, a GoPro Hero was the tool most reached for. Nothing else offered the performance in such a portable, rugged and affordable package.
In 2018, GoPro sold 4.3 million cameras worldwide, and it claims 88 per cent market share of the action-cam category in the US.
But the company faces increasing pressure from conventional digital cameras and smartphones, which feature higher-quality optics and, in the case of the smartphones, faster and more seamless ways to get footage from the device to the internet. Though GoPros still have their place; Kilmer says he now uses action cams mostly for tight shots he couldn’t get otherwise, such as dropping one into a motorcycle fuel tank to show corrosion.
For decades, we’ve known video is an ideal format for instruction. It’s like having a personal guide with you at every step, and takes the mystery and intimidation out of things. Tasks that seemed complex are often revealed to be simple (though not always easy). The emerging tech housed in those little GoPros, timed perfectly with the launch of YouTube, made creating those videos easier.
Now that we have capable contributors armed with GoPros, the power to accomplish almost any project is merely a search query away.