GoPro's video revolution

Nick Woodman is an avid surfer who 12 years ago created a waterproof camera so he could record himself and his friends catching some waves. It's called a GoPro, and it's now the bestselling camera in the world, and it's made Woodman a billionaire. GoPro is a wearable camera that can go just about anywhere, but what really sets it apart is that it allows anyone to become the star of their own real life movie. The results can be astonishing.
With GoPro cameras attached to their helmets, Matthias Giraud and his friend record what it's like to ski down a mountain in the French Alps -- and then to ski off it.
With GoPro you don't just see the action, you experience it. The camera is small, light and runs by itself. Underwater, on waves, on slopes, in the air -- GoPro has become the go-to camera for people who like adventure and action sports.
Nick Woodman: The original idea for GoPro was to help surfers capture photos of themselves surfing that made them look like a pro-- the idea "Go Pro."
Nick Woodman is 38, and thanks to the camera he created, one of America's newest billionaires.
Nick Woodman: Before GoPro, if you wanted to have any footage of yourself doing anything, whether it's video or photo, you not only needed a camera, you needed another human being. And if you wanted the footage to be good, you needed that other human being to have skill with the camera. The result was that most people never had any footage of themselves doing anything.
GoPro has certainly changed that. It can be attached to all kinds of things: the nose of a kayak, a hula hoop, a vulture in flight. It costs less than $400 and its wide angle lens doesn't just take high definition video, it can also take photographs, record time lapse and slow motion.
In 2012, a hundred and 38 sky divers, many of them wearing GoPros on their helmets and harnesses, set the world record for something called vertical sky diving. The aerial gathering was breathtaking and beautiful.
Back on planet Earth, a bike messenger and his feline co-pilot use a GoPro to record their rides on the streets of Philadelphia.
Nick Woodman Everybody around the world does something that they-- that they'd like to capture and relive and share with other people.
Anderson Cooper: Are you still surprised at how the camera's being used?
Nick Woodman: Oh, absolutely--
Nick Woodman: I always think of-- James Trosh...a teenager in the U.K.
Trosh, a film student, attached a GoPro and a toy robot to a weather balloon and then let it go. It rose 95,000 feet to the edge of space.
Nick Woodman: I remember seeing it for the first time on YouTube and just having my mind blown. I mean, we had never thought of using a GoPro like that. And I remember just saying, "That's what I'm talking about!"
Woodman was 26 when he started GoPro in 2002. He was a young entrepreneur with one failure already under his belt: an online gaming venture.
Anderson Cooper: It was a tech startup?
Nick Woodman: Yeah. FunBug.com-- I started it when I was 24. Raised $4 million of other people's money and lost it all two years later.
Because of that, he decided to finance GoPro himself with $260,000 in savings and money borrowed from family.
The first GoPro was a waterproof film camera attached to a wrist strap. Woodman sold them to California surf shops out of his van. Before long, he created a digital video camera that was a fraction of the size. Woodman sold enough of them that he could afford to take lessons to learn how to drive a race car. That's when he realized what the camera could become.
Nick Woodman: They-- wanted to rent me a camera to put on the car for 100 bucks for a half-hour session. And I thought, "Well, that's crazy. I've got a wrist camera in my car, my GoPro that shoots video. I'll just strap it to the roll bar. And everybody else in the school gathered around me and asked me, "Hey, where did you get that?" And I remember turning to the fellow that asked me and I said, "Dude, I made that." And I went out and I did my practice session in the race car, came back and looked at the footage and, "Wow." The light bulb went off and I realized GoPro needs to go from being a wrist camera company to being, you know, the everything camera company.
GoPros are now everywhere. People use them to turn family home videos into images even strangers might enjoy watching. Mount the camera on a stick, and a game of fetch with your dog, takes on a whole new focus.
Capturing action sports remains the camera's biggest selling point, and GoPro sponsors athletes as a way of promoting its brand.
Daredevil Jeb Corliss travels the globe to fly in a wingsuit adorned with GoPros. Here, he's rocketing along the Alps in Switzerland. Corliss makes a good part of his living licensing the video.
GoPro also sponsors Kelly Slater, the biggest name in surfing who's won a record breaking 11 world championships. Slater's camera skills have also pushed the boundaries of surfing photography.
Nick Woodman: Every surfer in the world dreams to ride the inside of a wave, a barrel, like Kelly Slater. And Kelly can take his fans there by-- he puts a GoPro in his mouth while he paddles into the wave. And as he pulls into the barrel, he takes the camera out of his mouth and holds it behind him, looks back and is traveling inside of this wave, having this incredible experience that before he was never able to share with anybody.
Its images like these that contribute to GoPro's bottom line. Revenue has doubled every year. Sales went from $350,000 in 2005 to over $500 million in 2012. It's on track to double that this year.

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