Cisco Pulls the Plug on Flip Camcorder Division

Wired comments on the demise of the Flip camcorder and questions what could have been done to possibly revive Cisco’s $590 million investment in the no-frills digital video camera (Cisco purchased Flip-maker Pure Digital in March 2009). Wired reports that in the wake of company earnings falling 18 percent in the second quarter of 2011, Cisco will pull the plug on Flip.

In related news, The Wall Street Journal reports Cisco CEO John Chambers has announced a strategic shift at the company that will involve stepping away from consumer-targeted brands and returning to a focus on corporate customers and service providers.

Flip cameras were all the rage in their heyday and spawned a number of similar products from the likes of Kodak and Sony geared toward consumers who wanted to shoot simple video and easily upload clips to the Internet. An unanticipated result of the camera’s portability and durability included uses such as capturing extreme sports footage and gathering b-roll for broadcast news. Affordable mounts for helmets and motorcycles soon emerged, as well as waterproof casings for recording underwater footage, increasing the line’s popularity. So what happened?

Wired suggests that once iPhones and Android phones started offering improved camera capabilities, including HD video recording, the Flip cameras started down a path of redundancy. Second, came the shift to real-time social networking — and without an Internet connection, Flip had trouble competing with other connected portable devices. Consumers began to expect immediacy in terms of media interaction and the ability to post their own content on-the-go.

A Wi-Fi or 3G connection may have been the first step in keeping the Flip alive, but in today’s market it would probably also need a touchscreen with apps to compete.

Related Story: David Pogue offers a different take on the camera line — “The Tragic Death of the Flip” (4/14/11)

UPDATE: Related press release — “Cisco Announces Streamlined Operating Model” (5/5/11)

6 Comments

  1. Cisco pulls the plug on its Flip camera line. Wired cites reasons including smarter general purpose devices and the shift to real-time social networking.
    Could a Wi-Fi version have saved the Flip?

  2. Cisco pulls the plug on its Flip camera line. Wired cites reasons including smarter general purpose devices and the shift to real-time social networking.
    Could a Wi-Fi version have saved the Flip?

  3. “That new Flip that the product manager showed me was astonishing. It was called FlipLive, and it added one powerful new feature to the standard Flip: live broadcasting to the Internet. That is, when you’re in a Wi-Fi hot spot, the entire world can see what you’re filming. You can post a link to Twitter or Facebook, or send an e-mail link to friends. Anyone who clicks the link can see what you’re seeing, in real time—thousands of people at once. Think how amazing that would be. The world could tune in, live, to join you in watching concerts. Shuttle launches. The plane in the Hudson. College lectures. Apple keynote speeches.”
    What if you could watch something important to you live. How would that change your world?

  4. “That new Flip that the product manager showed me was astonishing. It was called FlipLive, and it added one powerful new feature to the standard Flip: live broadcasting to the Internet. That is, when you’re in a Wi-Fi hot spot, the entire world can see what you’re filming. You can post a link to Twitter or Facebook, or send an e-mail link to friends. Anyone who clicks the link can see what you’re seeing, in real time—thousands of people at once. Think how amazing that would be. The world could tune in, live, to join you in watching concerts. Shuttle launches. The plane in the Hudson. College lectures. Apple keynote speeches.”
    What if you could watch something important to you live. How would that change your world?

  5. It’s quit possible that the Flip demise is signaling more to come as the transformation of the cloud – edge device paradigm shift continues. As we shift from physical to virtual; product to service; SAN to Cloud; enterprise to end-user; purchaser to subscriber; only the agile will survive and prosper. I see the Cloud starting to stratify, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS bla, bla, bla. So without second guessing Cisco’s rationale for flopping the Flip, could it simply be that they are focusing on the cloud layer they feel most comfortable competing from? That said, put the Flip division on eBay, I’ll bid!

  6. It’s quit possible that the Flip demise is signaling more to come as the transformation of the cloud – edge device paradigm shift continues. As we shift from physical to virtual; product to service; SAN to Cloud; enterprise to end-user; purchaser to subscriber; only the agile will survive and prosper. I see the Cloud starting to stratify, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS bla, bla, bla. So without second guessing Cisco’s rationale for flopping the Flip, could it simply be that they are focusing on the cloud layer they feel most comfortable competing from? That said, put the Flip division on eBay, I’ll bid!

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