The potential business model

What if a company treated cameras like Dell treats PC's?
What if you could jump on a web site and start specifying a camera.
Pages and pages of equipment options, with a price printed at the bottom that dynamically updates as you make selection.
Target price and size, and you would get a Scarlet delivered.
Target 'high end' and an Epic arrives.

What if you bought a Scarlet. Then what if all the bits were interchangeable and upgradeable, and you could grow it into an Epic over time?
What if you could buy a 'chip subscription' and every two years an upgraded imaging chip showed up in the mail?
What if Reds main biz was the codex and the imaging chip?
What size of an after-market support base would evolve as everything else on the cam was 'bolt on?'


Licensing
Say you were given the option of buying the chip outright or licensing it at a reduced price.
Buy it and it’s yours to own to do with what you please.

If you licence the use of a imaging chip, you pay a regular amount to the camera company and every couple of years an upgraded chip arrives in the post.
You might have to send your old chip back before the company sends you the update (if you’re a trusted customer they might send the chip out before you send the old chip back.)
Great for rental houses and studios.

The company now has a stock of two year old chips that it can re-sell or licence at a lower price. This would be for home users and film schools.
Instead of Scarlets 3K or Red Ones 4K. There is ‘cutting edge,’ ‘two year old,’ or ‘four year old’ versions of the imaging chip.
Depending on how imaging chips degrade over time, there may be an option to recycle the chips further into crash cams or whatever.

The camera company could do the same with the processing module. The latest version could have a new CPU, or logic boards, or the slice is thinner.
Older modules are available at a cheaper rate.

Essentially, we have a camera ‘platform’ which is specified by the camera company.
The company can sell it’s own branded SSD’s for instance but other manufactures could build slices for the platform based on a spec (much like the RedCode SDK,) and there could be a registration process where other manufactures can attain ‘approval’ by the camera company that manages the platform.


Buying and configuration your modular camera
A web page that allows the potential customer to select modules from a list.

A graphic of the selected configuration is displayed marking out weight distribution, centre of gravity, price of components and a running total.
Maybe suggestions on battery configurations to drive any powered components?
Suggestions on cabling would be useful too?

This graphic doesn’t need to be in 3d but a turntable view would be ‘sex on a stick’
If I was really going to make a Java jockey sweat, maybe a camera ‘construction set’ where 3d pieces could be moved around, attachment points would ‘snap’ together.
Configuration problems could be sorted virtually.