Microsoft and GoPro just signed a partnership that will enable the two companies to start licensing deals for "certain file storage and other system technologies."
The terms of the deal remain confidential, so neither GoPro nor Microsoft told the media more than the essential facts. This leaves room for speculation as to which patents get targeted by the two companies' cooperation.
"This agreement with GoPro shows the incredible breadth of technology sharing enabled through patent transactions," says president of Microsoft Technology Licensing, Nick Psyhogeos, says.
In the announcement, Psyhogeos points out that Microsoft meets the demand in wearable tech licensing, an area that is continuously growing. Microsoft has a wide array of partnerships with firms from all industries in order to provide optimized solutions for global customers.
It should be mentioned that one of the licenses available in Microsoft Licensing's files is the exFAT file system. This means that it is likely for the file format to be a strategic part of the Microsoft-GoPro agreement. ExFat is particularly interesting due to its capacity to store large and extra-large media files, ranging from 32 GB to as much as 256 TB.
Seeing that the latest GoPro cameras are compatible with SD cards of 128 GB, the exFAT is a must-have for the action camera company. GoPro already uses exFAT on larger cards, but the ones that sit under 64 GB are still trapped in the old FAT format. Because the top size for FAT32 disks is 4 GB, a 16-GB video footage will be split into four parts of 4 GB each.
When asked to elaborate on the details of the deal, Microsoft diplomatically refused.
"Nothing to share beyond what's in the press release," Microsoft Licensing LLC said.
On the bright side, the announcement injected some optimism in GoPro's investors. The action camera company saw a spike in share value of 5 percent in after-hours trading.
GoPro recently lost 19 percent of its stock value in the aftermath of its financial earnings call for the last quarter of 2015, so a slight increase is great news.
GoPro needs to step up its game if it wants to make up for the poor financial results, and implementing a larger extension size could be the beginning.
