Lytro (VC: $140mm) threw in the towel right after raising a bunch more money. Not to worry though! This isn’t the end for Lytro, they just aren’t going to make anything remotely like what their customers wanted to buy ever again.
What did they use to make? Lytro gave the consumer camera market the old college try, producing two very different cameras years apart and throwing each one into the Amazon Thunderdome to bleed and die alone. Each model served a different, oddly specific, likely non-existent niche with the only unifying Lytro touches consisting of that light field crap and their penchant for bizarre form factors (seemingly intended to kick off a custom camera bag side business that never materialized).
The first Lytro camera, creatively named Light Field Camera, cost $400 and looked like a short, squared spyglass. It came in a bunch of colors complementary to the average shoulder parrot and was apparently targeted at pirate captains – a group well-renowned for their early adoption of scurvy dogs and shivvered timbers. It’s unclear whether Lytro actually sold any of these cameras, or if their shipments were all shanghaied off the coast of Somalia.
When the Light Field Camera failed to produce its anticipated booty, Lytro thought for a quick minute that maybe there was some reason why camera bodies are all shaped similarly (hint: human hands), but you know what, that’s probably just coincidence. So they made the Lytro Italic, the first SLR-ish camera with an oblique form factor. Oh and it also has a non-interchangeable zoom lens just like all semi-pro cameras. This time around they decided to price it aspirationally at $1600, because damn that light field stuff was hard work and someone is going to pay for it.
Sales of this camera were “awesome”, apparently based on a scale that starts out on the low end with “awesome” and “badass” and ends just past “wicked”, at “zoinks”. All the Leica cameras ever sold only gets them into the “cool, cool” bracket, but every iPhone combined dominates the field at “yippee”.
Lytro planned future models to expand their lineup into bold, extra black extended oblique and bubble letter inspired camera shapes, but sadly it was not to be. Since everyone was too busy not buying cameras from the likes of Canon and Nikon, they couldn’t be bothered to feel bad about also not buying digital spyglasses and SLRs with factory seconds bodies from a no-name like Lytro. Faced with only “awesome” sales, Lytro had to give up on their consumer camera dreams just four years in.
Who got canned? 50 out of 130 employees got the boot, adjusting Lytro’s employee aperture from f/1.8 to f/4.0. The body count hopefully included whoever thought spyglasses were poised to come back into style. It’s also very likely to include the people responsible for Lytro’s online services, so maybe get your photos out of there before they all get taken on an incredible journey?
Lytro also lost their founder a while back to the siren call of academia and all of the associated money and fame of teaching 100-level courses.
How screwed are customers? Medium-screwed. Lytro cameras use a proprietary image format, and you need their desktop software to actually make their images safe for human eyeballs. Lytro also promised a bunch of firmware updates, and it seems kind of unlikely any of that is happening now that they don’t love you anymore. On the plus side, at least they aren’t pushing one last update to disable your shutter button.
Did they fess up? Kind of, but Lytro hasn’t come right out and said “we sold you dinosaurs right before a meteor strike.” It would seem by ‘lit up’ their CEO is suggesting the situation with their consumer business is akin to lighting your house on fire to evade friends and especially creditors, then leaving town to start a new life far, far away working at a Cinnabon in the desperate hope that no one comes looking for you. Kind of like how Lytro wants to move to Hollywood and sell movie cameras now.
What do they think is cool now? Talking pictures, see? There’s no future in re-focusing photos of clippers to see if they’re sailing under the colors of the Queen’s Navy. There’s money to be made in Hollywood and Lytro aims to get a piece of that pie.
Lytro wants to make a whole movie camera system now, and for once it looks like they intend to produce a camera in a suitable form factor and pitch it at an audience that might care to purchase it. I’m sure it was extremely tempting to make a giant purple octopus shaped movie camera without any physical buttons, using a Siri-style AI assistant that you yell “LYTRO! ACTION!” and “LYTRO! CUT! OH MY GOD I DIDN’T SAY WIPE DATA!” at, but Lytro managed to show a little restraint around its new friends.
They also seem to think VR is going to be a thing, but we all know that shit is a fad.
Will it work? They might have a shot. Removing backgrounds could be a minor revolution in film making, and the camera’s specs are way beyond what anyone else has on the market today. Lytro has to prove themselves though, and the simple fact is that no studio is going to trust their $100 million movie to the latest shiny toy to go cross-valley. Lytro is going to need that warchest to make it through the next few years.
For comparison, it took Red nearly four years before the first major picture was filmed with their first camera. It was another two years before business really started to pick up in earnest. Every other company in the motion picture camera business was founded before 1950.
Lytro needs to speak the language of Hollywood and hire people who know the industry if they want to succeed. Talking about how their camera is “military grade” and offering it only as a rental aren’t necessarily recipes for success.
What Lytro has really done with this pivot is to switch up the list of potential acquirers for their technology. Canon and Nikon are struggling to survive as it is, they don’t have the money to splash around on a big acquisition of a VC-funded boondoggle. Maybe Arri or Paramount or somebody else in southern California does?