Will Apple's iPhone Replace GoPro?

GoPro Inc GPRO is the leading maker of action cameras, but some fear that Apple Inc.'s AAPL iPhone will at least partially replace secondary cameras. Smartphones quickly eliminated the need for Flip Video, a niche camera brand that was acquired by Cisco Systems, Inc. CSCO in 2009. Cisco shut down the business a mere 23 months later. This has added to the belief that Apple could hurt GoPro, but is that really the case? "I've never really shared that opinion," Sean Udall, CIO of Quantum Trading Strategies and author of The TechStrat Report, told Benzinga. "In my mind, that has been an absurd fear that some smartphone would basically supplant action cameras. They'd have to become totally waterproof." Udall said he doesn't know how much more engineering would be needed to make iPhones waterproof. Even if that could be done, Udall said Apple would have to build a screen that was indestructible. "Part of the reason camera [lenses] don't crack is because they're super tiny," he said. "You have so much more surface area with a phone." Udall said he wondered what that device -- a phone that could replace action cameras -- would even look like. He argued that by the time that's possible, mobile phones may not be anything like the devices available today.

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'Excellent Substitutes'

Dan Miller, senior analyst and founder of Opus Research, told Benzinga that while smartphones turned out to be "excellent substitutes for snapshots and some video [cameras]," he doesn't think they will endanger GoPro. "GoPro did invent a new product category for cameras," said Miller. "You could look at the form factor of the Apple Watch and say it could be small enough to replace [the] small GoPro form factor, but as it is right now, it's pretty limited in what it has on it and what it can do." Miller said there is probably room for a phone peripheral that also works as a miniature video recorder. "But I don't know if that's in Apple's product plan," he continued. "It ain't gonna be a phone that replaces the action cam and it won't resemble how cameras on smartphones replaced digital cameras. That was almost a one-for-one swap." Disclosure: At the time of this writing, Louis Bedigian had no position in the equities mentioned in this report.