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Comment by sandieman | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone remember flipcam?

For reference: Cisco bought Pure Digital, an SF-based startup that created the Flip camera line, for $590 million in 2009, only to shut them down completely 2 years later:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/13/technology/13flip.html

That episode may be more a reflection on Cisco's confusion than anything wrong with the original product/market. (Perhaps with a less neglectful acquirer, Flip would have been a worthy competitor to GoPro.)

> Perhaps with a less neglectful acquirer, Flip would have been a worthy competitor to GoPro.

It'd have to flip mightily, Pure Digital did consumer "point and shoot" cameras, gopro does actioncams. They're the same thing only in that both are cameras (and then again, so are RED, would you argue RED is going to become a gopro competitor?)

They're both simple video cameras, GoPro just has a more robust housing to make it into an action camera.

Flip and GoPro both offer(ed) <$500 rechargeable compact consumer HD cameras through electronics retailers. You can find a number of discussions where buyers were weighing them against each other.

So it's not far-fetched they'd have become more direct competitors, with some sort of 'Action Flip' arriving, if Cisco hadn't essentially given up on retail/consumer video.

(Red differs in form-factor, feature set, pricing, target market, and distribution channel, so no, the same ripe potential for competition with GoPro isn't present.)

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