GoPro (GPRO 3.77%) investors are having a great week. In the pre-market hours of Friday morning, the camera maker's stock was up 22.7% since last Friday's closing bell, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence.
The catalyst made headlines, for sure.
Image source: Getty Images.
The tech behind GoPro's Emmy-winning feature
GoPro scored a technical 2025 Emmy Award for its image-stitching 360-degree video features.
The award announcement highlighted the way GoPro delivers seamless panoramic video in real time. It's one thing to put these immersive environments together with high-powered equipment and lots of rendering time in the studio, and a much more impressive feat to make it happen in a livestream or podcast, using nothing more than the camera and GoPro's cloud-based streaming services.
More than just an Emmy in GoPro's recent trophy case
The image-boosting Emmy Award was won in the middle of a little golden age for GoPro. The company recently posted robust second-quarter results, and there are artificial intelligence (AI) ingredients in its current recipe for long-term success.
One of GoPro's big jumps in August was inspired by a data-licensing program that makes some imagery available for training AI systems. Users of GoPro's online video storage services can make a little bit of money by allowing their videos to support AI-training practices.
It's an opt-in program with 125,000 hours of video material committed to the licensing opportunity as of Aug. 26, which is a veritable drop in the bucket -- the GoPro video-storage cloud holds 13 million hours of content. Then again, the so-called AI Training Program is really new, leaving less than a month between the July launch and August's activity update.
The company is walking a fine line between pleasing investors and satisfying camera customers here. Automatic AI-training sales would scare off a great number of GoPro users who insist on strict data integrity. With the opt-in model, each user gets to decide where they fall on the spectrum of moneymaking opportunity and privacy-guarding AI controls.
GoPro is capitalizing on this collection of bullish events. Management filed some paperwork on Aug. 26 to prepare for a stock sale. On Sept. 12, GoPro issued 11.1 million new shares via warrants to two creditor groups. GoPro's balance sheet shows zero long-term debt and management wants to keep it that way. Under these circumstances, roughly $29 million of share-sale cash comes in handy because the company's cash reserves are running low.
