In what appears to be a strange coincidence with GoPro (NASDAQ:GPRO) recent announcement that it was going to launch a consumer drone in 2016, the Federal Aviation Administration, FAA, has released a decree that will require most drone owners to register their devices in a bid to control the sharp increase in unmanned aircraft in US skies. Owners of drones weighing anything more than a half a pound, which virtually covers all drones bigger than palm-sized toys, will be required to register the devices on a government website and receive a unique user number which they will attach to their drones. The move by FAA has come just a day after GoPro announced the launch of its first consumer drone, the GoPro Karma, sometime in 2016. GoPro camera enthusiasts already use drones from companies such as DJI and 3D Robotics extensively to capture stunning aerial shots. Perhaps it was just a matter of time before GoPro decided to jump into the drone business.

Drone registration was widely viewed as the last step required to transform the drone industry from a hobbyist community to a fully-fledged mass-market commercial industry. GoPro released a teaser video titled ‘Karma is coming in 2016’ but didn’t divulge any details about the design of the drone. The video’s sweeping footage clearly demonstrates the stability of images captured by cameras mounted on the device. GoPro stressed that the silky smooth images had not been stabilized in post-production editing, probably in an answer to Morgan Stanley’s latest bearish note on GoPro where the analysts said that they:

‘’believe that the bigger issue is that key challenges of off- loading, storage and editing content have not been adequately addressed for a product intended to be “taken anywhere to record everything.”

Now that the FAA has officially acknowledged that drones are no longer a passing fad but are rather here to stay, what opportunities lie ahead for GoPro?